Olympus OM-40 (OM-PC)

Point any other early-eighties SLR at a person standing in front of a bright window and the meter quietly ruins the shot, turning the face into a silhouette to protect a sky nobody cares about. The OM-40 was Olympus's answer to exactly that problem. It shipped with ESP, Electro Selective Pattern metering, which read the center of the frame and the edges separately and decided, on its own, when the background was blowing out the subject. It would then bias exposure back toward the face. It was a clever, accessible take on backlight-aware metering, and backlit portraits are still the situation this little body handles better than its plainer siblings.

Olympus sold it as the OM-40 Program, OM-PC across the Atlantic, and the program mode is right there in the name. It will run full Program AE if you let it, setting both aperture and shutter while you just frame and shoot. But it is happiest in aperture priority, where you pick the f-stop and the body picks the shutter, and a column of LEDs down the left side of the finder tells you what it chose, from 2 seconds out to about 1/1000 with flash sync at 1/60. There is a manual mode too when you want full say. You can switch ESP off and fall back to ordinary off-the-film, center-weighted metering when you want predictability, which is the move for evenly lit scenes where the smart mode can second-guess itself. The finder is bright for the class, the focusing screen is a standard split-image with a microprism collar, and the whole thing is light enough that you forget it is around your neck.

This is an OM body, so it takes the entire Zuiko line, and those lenses are the real reason to be here. The 50mm f/1.8 is one of the sharpest cheap normals ever made, and the wides are tiny. The OM-40 sat below the OM-4 in Olympus's lineup, a consumer model rather than a pro tool, which is why it is plastic-skinned where the older bodies were brass and chrome. It was aimed at the photographer stepping up from a point-and-shoot who still wanted to choose an aperture.

The honest weakness is that it is electronic to the core. No battery, no camera, full stop, since there is no mechanical backup speed at all. The light seals on these have universally turned to tar by now, and a body that has not been recapped or had its seals replaced will fog film along the edges. Prices stay low precisely because buyers are nervous about the electronics, so budget for a service or buy from someone who has already done one.

When ESP gets fooled, and it does occasionally on scenes with a small bright subject against a dark field, a spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app lets you place the shadows on the zone you actually want instead of arguing with the body's pattern logic. Set the aperture, take the reading, and you have control the averaging meter cannot give you. For backlit family snapshots and street work in mixed light, though, the OM-40 mostly just gets it right, which is a real strength for a body in its class.