Olympus mju-II (Stylus Epic)

No other plastic point-and-shoot has been hyped, flipped, and marked up the way this one has. A camera that sold for under a hundred dollars at a drugstore counter in 1997 now trades for several hundred used, and the reason is one piece of glass: a 35mm f/2.8 lens, four elements, that is genuinely sharp wide open and renders with a contrast and bite that embarrasses cameras three times its size. The mju-II earned its reputation the hard way, by being right.

The body is the trick that made it famous. A clamshell cover slides over the lens, which both powers the camera down and protects the front element, so the whole thing drops into a coat pocket as a smooth rounded lozenge with nothing to snag. It is weatherproof, splash-rated, and weighs almost nothing because it is mostly polycarbonate over a tiny mechanism. The viewfinder is a small bright direct-vision window with a simple frame, fine in daylight and tight at night. Autofocus is active infrared with a focus lock on a half-press, fast enough for a candid on a sidewalk and prone to grabbing the background if you are not deliberate about where the center bracket sits.

Metering is the standard center-weighted cell you would expect from a drugstore compact, but there is more here than the dead-simple averaging eye in most of its rivals. The mju-II hides a spot mode you summon by pressing both back buttons together, which gives you a fighting chance against a backlit face when the program would otherwise wash it out. Program exposure rides the leaf shutter from 4 seconds all the way to about 1/1000. That leaf shutter is the other half of the story. It sits in the lens and flash-syncs at every speed, top to bottom, which is why a daylight-fill reading from Zone Light Meter pairs so well with this body: meter the backlit face, set your fill, and you are not fighting a sync ceiling the way you would with a focal-plane SLR.

The honest weakness is the flash, and it is a real one. By default the mju-II powers up wanting to fire, and unless you press the mode button to kill it every single time you slide the cover open, it will pop a hard frontal flash at a subject ten feet away in a dim bar. The setting does not stick between power cycles. Street shooters learn the muscle memory of cover-open, thumb to the flash button, raise to eye. Past that, the electronics are the long-term risk. There is no servicing a dead one. When the board goes, the camera goes, and parts cameras are now expensive enough that a fault is close to a write-off.

People still chase it for the obvious reason: it makes the pictures look like the camera that was always in someone's jacket in the late nineties, which it was. It gets cross-shopped against the Yashica T4 and the Contax T2, and it usually wins on price even after the hype, while giving up the manual control those richer cameras offer. Buy it for the lens and the pocketability, accept that it is a sealed black box, and feed it color negative film. It rewards exactly the kind of fast, unfussy shooting it was built for.