Olympus OM-4Ti Black

Carry a black OM-4Ti long enough and the paint starts giving up at the corners. The black is lacquer over titanium top and bottom plates, so wear on the prism hump and around the strap lugs rubs through to bare metal, and what shows is a dull silver rather than the gold patina a brass-topped body throws. The film door and the main casting inside are ordinary metal, not titanium, but both the top and bottom plates are the real thing, so the honest wear shows wherever your hand rides those plates. A black body with clean plates has spent its life in a drawer. One that has gone silvery at the edges has been out working, and you can read its hours off the finish.

The shutter is quiet and quick, a flat clack instead of a slap, running from a long couple of minutes down to about 1/2000 with flash sync at 1/60. Olympus damped the mirror deliberately, and you feel it. The camera settles rather than jumping, so you can hand-hold it a stop slower than its size suggests. The wind stroke is short and light. The whole body is genuinely tiny, a shock if you come to it from an F3 or an FM2, and it slips into a jacket pocket the way few pro-tier SLRs of its day will.

What you actually buy it for is the meter, and the finish has nothing to do with that. Aim the central spot at whatever matters and the body holds the reading. Take several and it averages them, up to eight, laying each out as a row of dots along the bottom of the finder so you see your whole tonal spread before the shutter trips. The HIGHLIGHT and SHADOW buttons let you tell the camera a white wall is white, not gray, and it places the tone where you want it. In aperture-priority you pick the f-stop and the body sets the speed off all of that. It reads contrasty light that leaves a plain averaging meter guessing, and on film that multi-spot system still has very little competition.

The weakness is plain. This is an electronic camera living on a pair of silver-oxide cells, and when they die you are down to a mechanical 1/60 and bulb, nothing else. The first OM-4 was a famous battery-eater thanks to a drain fault. The Ti shipped with the fixed low-drain board and behaves, but the dependence never leaves. Carry spares, and cap the lens between frames if you are storing it loaded.

For a backlit portrait or a split-contrast scene where even this meter has to compromise, an incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app lets you place the shadows on the zone you choose instead of letting the averaging logic split the difference. On the used market the black Ti sits a notch above the chrome one, partly for the finish and partly for the late production dates, and it gets cross-shopped against the Nikon FM3a by people after a small, smart, available-light body. Buy it for the meter and the size. Just keep fresh cells in your pocket, because a flat battery turns all that intelligence into a single mechanical speed.