"Be careful what you wish for; it might come true."
I have been looking for another OM body for some months now.
Yesterday I snared an OM-4 in good condition, with a new
OM4-Ti circuit installed, for a very good price. Lucky me!
Or not so lucky. After just a few hours with this body I
have come to loathe it. The problem is the ergonomics
(or "handling", as photo types call it.) Although it seems
OK when you first pick it up, a collection of small things
add up to a camera which is very unpleasant to use.
Here they are:
1. You can't see the shutter speed looking down at the
camera, because the prism housing obscures it. Since the
aperture is not shown in the viewfinder, you can never see
shutter speed and aperture together. This is especially
bad when the camera is mounted on a tripod for macro work.
2. In manual mode, an LCD number line is shown in the
viewfinder, but it is *backwards* from mathematical convention.
+ is to the left, and - to the right! Since I am in the
minority of people who hold a camera vertically with the
shutter release at the bottom, it's OK in vertical format.
On the OM-1 and OM-2N, this scale is at the left of the
viewfinder with + to the top, and therefore correct for
me in either format.
3. The exposure compensation dial is likewise backwards
from expected, with + proceeding anticlockwise. Even worse,
the *scale* rotates around the *dial*. When setting the
film speed, you have to perform a mental triple-negative.
4. An LCD bar graph is much harder to use than an
analogue swing needle. There have been scientific studies
done in the avionics industry to prove this. If the
reading is between two values on the LCD scale, the last
block blinks in a very distracting way. The LCD is just
a cost-saving by the manufacturer - on what was supposed
to be the top of the range model.
4. There is no spot metering manual mode. You have to
start in centre-weighted manual mode and push the "spot"
button. Then you centre the bar graph (drawn, per (2),
backwards, from right to left). Meanwhile, a second
moving diamond - the next spot reading, which the
camera is not using - is blinking away, distracting you.
There has to be a SPOT button in order for multi-spot
to work, but I'm only interested in a single spot reading.
In this respect the OM2000 and OM-2SP are both much
better cameras.
5. The camera gets sick of you after 120 seconds and
unilaterally throws away all your work. If you are using
the spot meter manually, it also changes the mode back
to centre-weighted, with very little in the viewfinder
to warn you. There should be a three-way switch
OFF-CENTRE-SPOT and another one MANUAL-AUTO. The second
would be left in one position by many people.
6. You have to read the instruction book from cover to
cover to figure out how to stop the camera from beeping.
Beeps are *always* evidence of poor interface design. When
you do switch it off, you find out why it was there: the
viewfinder doesn't indicate how many spot measurements have
the one value.
7. The highlight and shadow buttons are pointless features,
since there's already a compensation dial. I don't happen
to agree with 2 2/3 stops for shadow with the film I use,
but that's a moot point, since I can't actually push the
button with my fat finger. I have already suggested in (4)
that the SPOT button is a bad idea too.
8. The TTL socket is exactly where I like to rest a finger.
When a cord is attached to it, it tends to drift into the
field of view for macro work.
9. The MEMO mode looks deadly. If you should accidentally
bump this switch, *every* exposure from then on will be wrong.
I am so afraid of doing this I have taken to pressing CLEAR
(which cancels MEMO) every time I pick up the camera and
between every frame. More mental overhead.
10. The instruction manual actually says to remove the
batteries between sessions. They have to be joking.
11. I spent quite a while centreing the dioptric adjustment,
even though I wear contacts and don't need it. This knob
doesn't lock securely enough to prevent it being moved
in use. Even after this, the viewfinder is not as clear
as that of the OM-1 and OM-2N, although mercifully smaller.
There may be more problems. (1) and (2) are the killers,
and (4) is right up there. Fortunately the shop that sold
this camera has a return policy.
I know now that it wasn't lack of marketing or keen pricing
which lost Olympus the SLR market. They no longer *have* a
product worth marketing. I would not buy this camera new at
any price.
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