Olympus 35 ED

This is the cheap Olympus rangefinder nobody talks about, and that is exactly why it is worth carrying. The 35 RC gets the magazine love and the 35 SP gets the spot-meter cult, but the 35 ED sits between them with a fixed 38mm f/2.8 lens, a body small enough to forget in a jacket pocket, and a price that still tracks below its more famous siblings. It came out in the mid-1970s, near the end of Olympus's run of compact 35s before the XA changed the whole category, and it has the feel of a company that had already built a dozen of these and knew what to leave out.

You shoot it in programmed auto, because that is the only mode it has. The CdS meter sets shutter and aperture together and you never touch either one. There is no shutter-speed or aperture readout in the finder. In fact there is no exposure or battery indicator in the finder at all; the only built-in battery check is mechanical, where you aim at a bright subject and the shutter simply fires if the cell has power. You frame, focus, and trust the program. The viewfinder is bright for the class, with projected frame lines and a rangefinder patch in the center that is small but contrasty enough to nail focus in daylight. Loading is the usual sprocket-and-take-up affair, nothing clever. The thing that surprises people picking one up for the first time is the weight. It is denser than it looks, more metal than the plastic compacts that came after, and it sits steady in your hands.

The shutter is a leaf design behind the lens, soft and quick, topping out around 1/800. Because it is a leaf shutter it flash-syncs at every speed, which matters more than it sounds. You can drop in fill flash at a fast shutter speed in bright sun and tame harsh midday shadows without the sync ceiling that an SLR fights. For that kind of daylight fill work, a quick reading from the Zone Light Meter app pairs naturally with the sync flexibility, since you can pick your aperture and trust the shutter to keep up.

The honest weakness is the meter, and it is the same weakness every CdS compact of this era carries. These cells age, and the cameras were built for mercury batteries that no longer exist. A 35 ED that has sat in a drawer for forty years will often read a stop or two off, and there is no manual mode to fall back on when the auto exposure drifts. You can hunt down an adapter and a hearing-aid battery to get the voltage closer, but you are still trusting a fifty-year-old photoresistor. When the meter finally goes for good, an incident reading off the app and a steady hand on the aperture ring is how you keep shooting it.

So who buys one today? People who want the Olympus rendering and the leaf-shutter quiet without paying 35 SP money, and people who already own three rangefinders and want one to abuse. The market treats it as a user, not a trophy, and prices it accordingly. Cross-shop it against the Canonet QL17 if you want a faster lens and a manual mode, but if you want something smaller that you will actually carry every day, the 35 ED earns its keep.