Olympus OM-2n

Wind the lever and the OM-2n barely makes a sound, a soft mechanical sigh instead of the clatter you expect from a 1970s SLR. That quiet came from one of Maitani's obsessions: kill the noise, kill the vibration, shrink the whole machine. Pick one up after a Nikon F2 and the difference is almost funny. The OM bodies are small the way a Leica is small, and the finder is the payoff. It is huge and bright, with the focusing screen sitting in a body so compact you keep checking that there is really a full-frame pentaprism in there.

The headline trick is the meter. The OM-2n reads light off the film itself during the exposure, an honest-to-god real-time measurement of photons bouncing off the film plane, not a guess made a half-second before the mirror flips. In aperture-priority auto you pick the aperture, the camera watches the actual scene through the actual exposure and trims the shutter on the fly, which is why long auto exposures on this body are weirdly trustworthy. The shutter runs from a marathon 120 seconds up to about 1/1000, with flash sync at 1/60. Set the lens, frame, focus on the bright split-prism, and the body does the math.

This is where the Zone Light Meter app earns its place in the bag. The off-the-film meter is center-weighted and reads reflected light off the scene, so a backlit doorway or a bright sky will pull your shadows down into mud. Take an incident or spot reading from the app, decide which zone the shadows belong on, and either dial that into exposure compensation or flip to manual and set it yourself. The camera is brilliant at executing an exposure and indifferent about choosing one in a tricky scene.

The honest weakness is the obvious one for any electronic auto body from this era. No battery, no shutter at all except the mechanical B setting. Even 1/60 is electronically timed on this body, so a dead cell locks it up at every marked speed. Two small cells run the whole thing, and the original light seals turn to tar after forty years, so a body that has not been serviced will fog frames and leak light around the door. Budget for a CLA. The prism foam degrades too, which is why some finders show black flecks.

People reach for the OM-2n as a travel and street camera, the SLR you carry when you do not want to carry an SLR. It earned a cult following among photographers who wanted Nikon reliability in a jacket pocket, and the Zuiko glass is part of the draw. The 50mm f/1.8 is sharp and cheap, the 35mm f/2 and 85mm f/2 are quietly excellent, and the whole system was built to be light. Cross-shop it against the Pentax ME Super or the Canon AE-1 Program and the OM wins on finder and feel, loses on nothing that matters. It is still one of the best-handling 35mm cameras anyone made, and prices reflect that people have figured it out.