In the last few weeks I’ve ended up owning a couple of very similar looking 35mm compact Olympus cameras. Currently I’m extremely pleased with both of them, as they take lovely sharp photos without me even having to take a moment to think about shutter speeds or depth of field. Both of course have their eccentricities that cameras of such age shouldn’t go without. For example with both cameras if you press the shutter button too fast they seem liable to give you incorrect exposures, something which I’ve learnt through a series of spectacularly poor attempts by ASDA’s scanning to correct it.

35 ECR

The 35 ECR’s favourite eccentricity is taking now illegal 1.3V mercury batteries to power it. Spending 10 minutes bodging the battery holder with some paper and some tin foil allows you to put 2× 675 hearing aid batteries in one of the two slots, giving the correct voltage. Even then though the status lights seem to fade sometimes in completely unpredictable ways. Still as my test roll has shown me, it wasn’t affecting the exposure.

Trip 35

The Trip 35 on the other hand has a selenium light meter, and so no batteries at all! Unfortunately though, rather than the elegant rangefinder focusing mechanism of the 35 ECR, it has a rather antiquated feeling zone focusing mechanism. Sure there’s a certain charm to selecting either 1 person, 2 people, 3 people or a mountain to focus, but my god is it infuriating when your distance estimation isn’t up to scratch and all your photos come back slightly out of focus.