Olympus OM-101 Power Focus (OM-88)

Olympus had watched Minolta's autofocus SLRs run away with the market, and in 1988 it answered with this. The OM-101, sold in some markets as the OM-88, takes the lovely OM mount and bolts on a feature called Power Focus. Here is the catch most people get wrong: the focus motor does not live in the body driving any old Zuiko. It lives inside Olympus's dedicated AF and PF lenses. The body just gives you a thumb dial on the back right to steer focus, and the lens does the moving. Put an ordinary manual OM Zuiko on the front and you focus it the way you always did, by hand, on the ring. Power Focus simply does nothing for that glass.

So the gimmick only works with a small family of special lenses, and it shares that lens-motor design with the OM-707, the failed autofocus body Olympus had launched two years earlier in 1986. Underneath, the standalone body is a program-auto camera. That word matters. On the bare OM-101 you do not get aperture priority or manual; you get program, full stop. Aperture priority and manual only appear if you clip on the optional Manual Adapter 2, and finding one of those now is its own little hunt. The meter is center-weighted, reads through the lens, and is genuinely fine for daylight and portraits. The shutter is a focal-plane unit that runs from a long 2 seconds out to about 1/2000, with flash sync at 1/60.

The finder is better than the body's reputation suggests. It carries a Super Lumi-Micron screen with a split-image rangefinder and a microprism collar, so you can actually focus a manual lens through it without squinting. Bright, usable, no apology needed there. The handling is where the air goes out of it. After the all-metal OM-1 and OM-4, the OM-101 feels like plastic, because it largely is. Light, a touch hollow, and it leans hard on its batteries. No power means no camera. There is no mechanical fallback speed at all.

Who shoots one now? Not many people for the Power Focus, which is exactly why these sit cheap. The honest reason to buy an OM-101 is the mount. People grab it, run a roll through Power Focus as a novelty, then mount a Zuiko 50mm f1.8 and use it as a quiet program body for next to nothing. It is a cheap door into Olympus glass. The system it was built around is the weak link: PF focusing is slow and hunts, and it was never a match for the real phase-detect AF cameras from the same year. The part that justified the camera is the part you quietly stop using.

For tricky light the center-weighted meter will let you down in the usual ways. Backlit faces and stage lighting fool it into underexposing the subject. Take an incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app, decide where you want the shadows to land, and meter from that instead of trusting the body's averaging. On the bare OM-101 you are committing that reading through program auto, so lean on the backlight compensation button, which adds a fixed boost, to nudge it toward your reading. Bolt on the Manual Adapter 2 and you can finally set the aperture yourself and let the body pick the speed, which is the only way this camera gives you that kind of control. Treated for what it is, a light program SLR with a fine OM finder, it does its job. Lean on it as an autofocus camera and it will wear your patience down.