Olympus 35 ECR

Pocket it and you forget it is there. That was the whole point of the 35 ECR. Olympus built it in 1972 as the budget end of their 35 EC compact line, a fixed-lens body that did almost all the work for you. Japanese makers were racing to put a competent automatic camera in every hand that year, and Olympus answered with something small, light, and nearly idiot-proof.

Focusing is the part most people fuss over. The ECR uses zone focusing: you set distance by symbols in the finder, picking a portrait, group, or landscape range rather than a precise figure. That puts it in the same camp as the plainer EC and EC2, which focus the same way. The finder is small but bright enough, and the zone marks are quick to read in decent light, so portraits and close work come down to picking the right symbol rather than fussing over a fine distance scale.

Exposure is fully automatic, and there is no override worth speaking of. The CdS cell reads the scene and the camera sets both aperture and shutter speed on a program. You set film speed, you focus, you press the button. The leaf shutter runs from a long four seconds down to about 1/800, a wide range for a body this size, and because it is a leaf design the flash syncs at every speed instead of capping at 1/60 the way a focal-plane SLR does. Daylight fill flash just works. That sync flexibility pairs well with a daylight reading from the Zone Light Meter app: meter the scene, dial in your fill, and the leaf shutter will hold sync wherever the program lands.

The honest weakness is the battery. The ECR will not fire without a live cell powering that meter, no mechanical backup speed, nothing. Dead battery, dead camera. The original mercury cells are gone, and coaxing accurate metering from a modern replacement takes attention to voltage. When the aging CdS reading drifts, you are stuck with whatever the program decides.

It trades cheap today, which is a fair chunk of the appeal. People cross-shop it against the Olympus Trip 35 and the small Konica and Yashica compacts of the same years. The Trip usually wins on collector cachet, and the ECR's longer slow-shutter range gives it a small edge in dim light, though neither point settles the argument. Buy one with fresh seals and a meter that still reads true, and it does exactly what it was built for: a small camera you keep in a jacket and shoot without thinking.