Olympus OM-2

Yoshihisa Maitani had already shrunk the SLR with the OM-1, proving in 1972 that a professional 35mm body did not have to be the size of a Nikon F. The OM-2 took that compact body and gave it a metering trick nobody else was running in a production camera. It arrived in 1975 as the automatic sibling, same compact metal chassis, a copper-alloy casting under chrome or black enamel, same quiet shutter, but now it read the light off the film itself during the exposure and adjusted on the fly. Olympus called it off-the-film metering, OTF, and it is what built the OM-2's reputation.

Here is what that means in your hand. Set the lens to the aperture you want, flip the dial to Auto, and the camera reads light bouncing off the film plane in real time as the shutter is open. Cloud passes over mid-exposure, the meter compensates. It is aperture-priority done properly, with a needle on the left of the finder sweeping a scale from 1 second up to about 1/1000. The viewfinder is the Maitani signature: big, bright, generous magnification, easily one of the best finders of its generation for focusing a fast 50. Split-prism in the center, microprism collar around it, ground glass beyond. You load it the way you load any OM, hinge the back, thread the leader, and it weighs almost nothing for a camera this serious.

The OM system is what you are buying into, and it ran deep. Zuiko primes that held their own against anything in the price bracket, motor drives, and TTL flash automation read off the film plane, pioneered on this 1975 body with the Quick Auto 310 and later extended by the T-series, which was genuinely ahead of the field. Students, travelers, and working photojournalists all carried OM bodies, often as a small second body alongside a Leica. A clean OM-2 with a 50mm still trades cheap today and does almost everything a film shooter actually needs.

The honest weakness is the electronics. The OM-2 does not run without batteries the way the all-mechanical OM-1 does. Two cells live in the bottom, and with dead batteries the OM-2 simply will not fire. There is no mechanical fallback speed at all; the emergency mechanical 1/60 only arrived later, on the OM-2 Spot Program. The meter circuitry is now fifty years old, the foam light seals have almost certainly turned to tar, and a proper CLA from someone who knows OM bodies is not cheap. Buy from a seller who has actually run a roll through it.

People cross-shop this against the Pentax ME Super and the Nikon FE, and the OM-2 usually wins on finder brightness and on that OTF meter doing its reading in real time as the shutter runs rather than guessing beforehand. Where any center-weighted meter still gets fooled is the hard backlit frame, the snowfield, the stage spot. For those, take an incident or spot reading from Zone Light Meter, place your shadows on the zone you actually want, and shoot it on Auto knowing the exposure is yours and not the camera's guess.