Olympus 35 DC

Trip the release and there is almost nothing to feel. No mirror, no slap, just a flat little tick down in the lens barrel and the frame is gone. The 35 DC runs a leaf shutter, so the loudest part of taking a picture is the wind lever afterward, and you can shoot a man at the next table while he keeps reading his paper. That quiet is the point of the whole 35 line, and the DC is the one Olympus aimed at people who did not want to think.

People usually expand DC to Deluxe Compact, though Olympus never said so in any manual, and the standout part is the glass either way. Olympus put the same fast F.Zuiko 40mm f/1.7 on the front that made the pricier 35 RD a cult object, six elements, sharp wide open in a way that still surprises people, soft and glowing at f/1.7 and clinical by the time you reach f/5.6. On a body this size that lens is the entire reason to own one. It is a chrome-and-black brick, dense the way only early-seventies compacts are, machined rather than molded, and it disappears into a coat pocket without disappearing from your hand.

Where the DC parts ways with its siblings is exposure. There is no manual mode and no aperture ring you can grab. You set the film speed, focus the coupled rangefinder patch in the bright finder, and a CdS cell reads the scene and picks both shutter and aperture off a program line. That is the deal, take it or leave it. The one concession to a thinking photographer is the backlight button on the back of the body. Press it and the meter opens up about a stop and a half, which saves the face when your subject stands against a window or a bright sky. The finder shows parallax-corrected frame lines and a needle that warns you when the light is too low to shoot, and that is the extent of the conversation.

Because the shutter is a leaf type, flash syncs at every speed instead of dropping to a slow ceiling, which is unusual freedom for a point-and-shoot. A daylight-fill reading from the Zone Light Meter app pairs with that sync flexibility, letting you drop a strobe into a backlit portrait and keep the ambient where you want it rather than leaving it to the program line. The DC handles speeds from a slow 1/15 up to about 1/500, so it is happiest in ordinary light and starts struggling when the sun goes down.

The honest weakness is the meter and its age. The DC was built around a mercury cell that has been illegal for decades, so most surviving bodies run a stop hot, drift in the cold, or have been adapted to get close on a modern battery. With no manual override there is no shooting around a sick meter the way you can on the 35 RD, which is the real reason collectors reach for the RD or the spot-metered SP first and leave the DC cheaper. Buy one with a meter someone has checked and you get that f/1.7 lens in a near-silent pocket camera for not much money. Buy a neglected one and you get a beautiful paperweight with great glass.