Olympus OM-2SP (OM-2S Program)

Press the shutter on an OM-2SP and the first thing you notice is that the camera is quieter and smaller than you expected it to be. Olympus built the whole OM line around shrinking the SLR, and this body is the proof: it weighs nothing in the bag, the mirror has a soft, damped report rather than a slap, and the controls sit where the original OM-1 put them. Shutter speed lives on a ring around the lens mount instead of on the top plate, which throws everyone the first time and then feels obvious forever.

Look through the finder and it is bright and big, with near-total frame coverage and a clean microprism-and-split-image screen that snaps into focus fast. This was the camera that gave the OM line program auto and a true spot meter in one body, sitting above the OM-2 and below the OM-4 in the family. You get three modes: aperture priority, full program, and manual. The meter is the clever part. In auto it reads light off the film plane during the exposure, which handles changing light mid-frame, and in manual it switches to a spot reading you can take off a small central patch. For a body this size, having a real spot meter built in was a genuinely useful thing.

The shutter is electronic and runs from about 1/1000 down to roughly 60 seconds in auto (one second in manual), with flash sync at 1/60. Those long auto times help at night, since the camera will sit there metering a dark street and decide on its own that the frame needs eight or thirty seconds. The auto and intermediate speeds are all electronic, so dead batteries cost you the meter and the full speed range. But unlike the older all-electronic OM-2, this body keeps a mechanical fallback: a red 1/60 next to B on the speed ring (and Bulb) fires with no battery at all, so you are never fully stranded. You do lose metering, so spare cells still matter, especially given this body's appetite for them.

Who buys one now: photographers who want the OM system's small lenses and bright finder but also want program auto and a spot meter without paying OM-4 money. People cross-shop it against the Nikon FE2 and the Canon AE-1 Program, and it usually undercuts both because Olympus bodies have never gotten the collector heat the Nikons get. The honest weakness, beyond the meter going dark when the cells die, is the electronics themselves. These are aging boards, the spot meter circuit can drift, and a body with a flaky meter is hard to repair because parts are scarce and a good OM technician is harder to find every year.

So check the meter before you commit to one, and carry a backup read for the scenes the body bungles. The off-the-film meter is smart in even light and easily fooled by a bright sky behind your subject, so for a backlit portrait or a high-contrast scene, take an incident or spot reading with Zone Light Meter, set exposure for the shadows you care about, and shoot it in manual. Sane meter, fresh cells, and the OM-2SP is one of the most pleasant small SLRs of its era to carry all day.