December 27, 2010

A Closer Look at the Olympus PEN D2

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Look at the time. 2010 is almost over, and it’s been a good year for me, not just in my personal and professional life but also in this photography hobby of mine. I was able to travel to the United States and stay there for a month, shooting as we went crisscrossing the country. I was able to shoot the Great Wall of China and Beijing’s Forbidden City.  For Christmas, I gave out framed prints, which were very well-received by my immediate family. And, I was able to acquire some very choice pieces of vintage gear.

The first one I mentioned last post: an Olympus PEN D2. I’ve been shooting with it for some time now and I can say that it is one really sweet shooter. It took a while to get used to focusing with the lever but after a few days, I could guesstimate focus fast like the best of them. Still haven’t taken it to my technician so I don’t know if the meter can still be revived, but that’s a minor niggle – I’m seldom without a handheld meter anyway.

This morning I was able to take some digital shots of the camera, just to give readers a closeup look at this cool piece of kit. Here they are, with more after the jump.

The CdS meter may be dead but at least I can go ahead and shoot manually.

(more…)

 

September 23, 2010

A Pen-ultimate Olympus Collection

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Call me greedy but in just a couple of months I now have four vintage Olympus PENs: an original PEN, a PEN S, a PEN W and a PEN EE.

The PEN W came to my attention by accident, when I bought an Ricoh Auto Half E off a local bloke who was disposing of his dead father’s camera collection. I spotted it among the pile of old cameras and went back to purchase it after a few weeks of researching it online.

The other PENs all came from Ebay, and arrived pretty much at the same time last week. The PEN EE has a problem with the aperture and meter. I don’t feel optimistic about it (when a selenium cell is dead it’s pretty much useless), so the EE might just be cannibalized for parts, since the various PEN models share many components. The PEN S and PEN have minor mechanical niggles but nothing my friendly camera technician can’t handle. They go in for CLA some time next week.

Here are some results from my three test rolls.

Olympus PEN (original)

Olympus PEN

Olympus PEN

Olympus PEN

Olympus PEN S

Olympus PEN S

Olympus PEN S

Olympus PEN S

Olympus PEN W

Olympus PEN W

Olympus PEN W

Olympus PEN W

 

July 1, 2010

My New Old Camera: the Ricoh Auto Half E

Posted by travelomo under Gear | Tags: , , , |
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Ricoh Auto Half E

Sometimes things just fall into place.

I wasn’t even aware of the existence of the Ricoh Auto Half until I came across an intriguing entry on the camera blog Circle Rectangle. The post described these gorgeous digital-analog cameras coming out of the workshop of Japanese photographer Ryu Itsuki. He would take a modern digital camera and shoehorn it painstakingly (and no doubt lovingly) into the shell of a stylish half frame camera from the 1960′s called the Ricoh Auto Half. Forget the digital conversion – I was immediately drawn to the original camera. What it lacked in size – it was really tiny – it made up for with a minimalist design so spartan and simple as to be described as iconic.

I just had to have one. But how?

The blog post provided a link to Ryu Itsuki’s website, where several Auto Half models were available for sale. Though each model on the shelf was gorgeous, most were priced above my monthly budget for hobbies and, ahem, non-essentials. I tried Ebay, which reflected similar prices. I even emailed Ricoh’s Southeast Asian marketing manager on the off-chance he’d have dead stock in a warehouse somewhere. No luck.

Ed, my longtime fellow gadget geek and colleague said he’d spotted one on a local classified ad website, so I checked it out. It was disappointing – the photos were bad and the camera looked ratty, with a crack on the bright frame window. The ad also said: Defective. I don’t think so, I decided.  But, over the weekend the thought nagged me, what if it worked? I called up the seller and made an appointment.

And I bought it. Here’s what I got:

Update: I’ve run my first test roll through it and it seems to work. Waiting for the scans to come back. Will post results asap.

 

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