Olympus OM-4Ti

Put an OM-4Ti next to the Nikon FM2 that everyone cross-shopped it against in the late eighties and you are looking at two completely different philosophies. The Nikon is a fortress: all mechanical, meter optional to the picture, built to outlive you. The Olympus answers with the most intelligent light meter anyone had put in a 35mm body, and it bets the whole camera on a couple of silver-oxide cells to run it. One is a hammer. The other is a slide rule that happens to take pictures.

The reason to carry one is the metering, and it still has no real equal on film. You aim the central spot at whatever matters, press the SPOT button, and the camera memorizes that reading. Do it again somewhere else and it averages the two. You can stack up to eight spot readings across a scene and the meter folds them into one exposure, with a little analog scale of dots along the bottom of the finder showing exactly where each one fell. There are dedicated HIGHLIGHT and SHADOW buttons too. Hit HIGHLIGHT on a white wall and the camera places it two stops up where a white wall belongs, instead of dragging it to gray like every averaging meter on earth. In aperture-priority you set the f-stop, the body picks the speed off all of that, and it nails contrasty light that fools lesser cameras cold.

The finder is the other half of the pleasure. Olympus OM bodies have a big, bright pentaprism for such a small camera, and the OM-4Ti is no exception, with a microprism-and-split-image center that snaps into focus fast. The whole thing is tiny in the hand, a genuine shock if you are coming off a Nikon F3. The titanium top and bottom plates give it that champagne color and a bit more weather sealing than the plain OM-4, and the shutter runs from a full second up to about 1/2000 with flash sync at 1/60. The party trick is the F280 flash, which pulses long enough to sync across the whole frame at every shutter speed, so you can fill a backlit face in daylight at top speed.

Now the honest weakness, and it pays to get the history straight. The plain OM-4 this descends from earned a real reputation as a battery-eater. A fault in its processor left the meter circuit drawing current when it should have been idle, and people swapped cells far more often than they should have had to. Olympus answered with a revised low-drain board, and every OM-4T and OM-4Ti shipped with the latest version of it, so the baseline draw is a fraction of the old body's. That makes the Ti easy on cells by the standard of its day. What stays true is the dependence itself: this is an electronic camera, and a dead pair of cells is a dead camera, with only the mechanical 1/60 backup and bulb left to you. Carry spares and cap the lens.

For a tricky backlit or split-contrast scene, this is exactly where an incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app earns its place, letting you place the shadows on the zone you want instead of trusting any averaging needle. Today the OM-4Ti sits in that affordable-but-clever tier, bought by landscape and available-light shooters who want the spot meter and the small body, and avoided by anyone who wants something they can drop in a river. It is the thinking photographer's compact SLR, and the meter is the whole argument.