Olympus 35 SPn

Stand a subject against a bright window or a midday sky and trip the shutter at 1/500 with a flash on the hot shoe. The Olympus 35 SPn does this without complaint, and most cameras of its size cannot. The leaf shutter sits inside the lens and syncs flash at every speed, so you can drag the background down with that top speed and still pour fill light onto a backlit face. SLRs of the same era cap flash sync around 1/60 and blow the highlights. That gap is the whole reason a leaf-shutter compact still has a job.

The reason it works is the same reason the body feels dense in the hand. That fixed lens is a fast G.Zuiko, and the shutter mechanism is built into it, ticking from a full second up to about 1/500. The sound is a soft snick, no mirror, no slap, the kind of shutter you can fire in a quiet room without anyone looking up. Focus is a rangefinder patch in a bright finder with parallax-corrected frame lines, and the patch is contrasty enough to nail it in dim light. Loading is ordinary back-door 35mm, and the camera gets out of your way once the film is in.

What sets the SPn apart from the cheaper fixed-lens crowd is the meter. Olympus gave it a CdS cell with a true spot reading, not just the usual averaging eye. You can meter a single highlight or a face and ignore the rest of the frame, which on a leaf-shutter compact in the 1970s was rare. The finder shows a needle riding an EV scale, and there is a programmed auto mode, engaged by setting the ring to A, for when you want to move fast.

The honest weakness is that the meter runs on a 1.35-volt mercury cell that has not been sold in decades. People work around it with a zinc-air hearing-aid battery or an adapter, but the cell ages, the CdS gets sluggish in the cold, and a lot of surviving bodies meter a little off or not at all. If yours has a dead cell, this is where a daylight-fill reading from the Zone Light Meter app earns its keep. It pairs with that all-speed flash sync, so you set the background exposure and let the flash do the face, no working built-in meter required.

Today the SPn trades for more than a plain fixed-lens rangefinder and less than the boutique compacts that command collector prices. People who seek it out buy it for the spot meter and the leaf shutter, since most pocket cameras offer neither. It is heavier than a Trip 35 and slower to grab than a fully automatic point-and-shoot, but it gives you control those cameras refuse to. Find a clean one with working seals and a sorted meter and it punches well above its asking price.