The viewscreen on all the OM bodies is the same size.
On the OM-1 & 2, the image in the viewfinder shows 970f the image on
the film at a magnification of 0.92x
When they went from mechanical metering indicators that stuck out into
the image area to electronic readouts that had to be seen outside the
image, something had to give. I suspect increasing the prism size would
have had major consequences for body design and tooling. Things are
pretty tight in there and a bigger mirror box would make the whole
camera bigger and cost a lot in redesign and retooling a great many
basic parts that remained much the same through the entire OM line. Thus
it wouldn't just be a bigger lump on top, but a bigger camera with much
higher start-up costs. This change would also have spun off into MDs and
winders, etc. So they made 2 different compromises for pro and consumer
models:
On the later single digit OMs, the 97 overage is maintained, but the
magnification is reduced, to 0.86x on the 2Sp and to 0.84x on the 3 & 4
series. So the image is indeed a little smaller.
On the 'double digit' OMs, the 0.92x magnification is maintained, but
coverage of the film image is reduced to 93%. Details in the image are
the same size as on the 1 & 2, but some image area is missing around the
edges.
I'll bet the OM-5 was going to go back to the full size image with
superimposed LCD metering info ;-) (Well, that's what I'd do.)
Moose
Boris Grigorov wrote:
Hi all,
This weekend was the first time when I had a chance to hold and look through
the viewfinder of the OM4T.
It was at a store that closed its doors after 50 years. The shape of the camera was not
very good and at "half-price" of $225 was far from a fang, so I left it.
The reason I am writing about it is because when I looked through the viewfinder, I had the impression that the image is a "little further" from the eye than the one in my OM1. I did not have my camera at the time and was not able to compare, but think that got it right. What do you think?
Thanks in advance
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