Olympus OM-10

A college kid at a thrift store picks up the smallest SLR on the shelf, points it at the window, and watches a row of red LEDs blink down the side of the finder as the clouds move. That camera is almost always an OM-10. Olympus sold a mountain of them between 1979 and 1987, and they are still the first real film camera for thousands of people every year, because they are tiny, cheap, and they meter the scene for you.

The OM system was Olympus deciding that an SLR did not have to be a brick. The pro bodies in the line, the OM-1 and OM-2, set the template: a small body, a big bright finder, and a shutter speed ring around the lens mount instead of on the top plate. The OM-10 is the budget version of that idea, aimed at the person buying their first interchangeable-lens camera. It is aperture priority only out of the box. You pick the f-stop, and the body reads the light off the film during the exposure (Olympus's OTF Direct Metering, with a silicon cell that watches the curtain travel) and the focal-plane shutter picks a speed somewhere between about 1 second and 1/1000, with flash sync at 1/60. A separate CdS cell drives the red LED scale you see in the finder, so you get a preview readout before you trip the shutter even though the real exposure is measured at the instant of firing. The finder is the good part. Bright and roomy for such a small camera, with a split-prism center that snaps into focus fast, and the exposure scale runs down the left edge so you never take your eye away to check it.

Here is the famous catch. The OM-10 has no manual mode unless you buy the little Manual Adapter that plugs into the front of the body. Without that dongle you are locked into auto, full stop. Plenty of these cameras have been sold and resold for forty years with the owner never knowing the adapter existed, so they shot the whole roll on aperture priority and never missed it. But it is the body's defining limitation, and it is the reason snobs wave the OM-10 off in favor of the OM-1.

The other honest weakness is that this is an electronic camera that depends on its batteries. No cell, no shutter, no meter, nothing. The light seals also turn to goo on a body this old, and a leaky seal will fog your film with no warning. Both are cheap to deal with, but a thrift-store OM-10 should be treated as untested until you run a roll through it.

For the price, almost nothing competes. A clean OM-10 with the 50mm f/1.8 costs less than the Nikon FE or the Canon AE-1 that people cross-shop it against, and it is noticeably lighter than either. That auto meter is fine in even light and fooled by everything else, which is exactly where a handheld reading earns its keep. Point a backlit portrait or a snowfield at the OM-10 and it will stop the scene down to mud. Take an incident or spot reading with Zone Light Meter, place your shadows where you want them, set that aperture, and let the body's shutter follow. You get the convenience of auto and the control the OM-10 otherwise refuses to give you.