Olympus PEN-D2

A guy on a Tokyo side street at dusk thumbs the focus ring to about two meters, glances at the matchstick needle in the top window, and fires off twelve frames before his coffee goes cold. He is shooting half the size of the camera the man next to him is carrying, and twice the frames per roll, because the whole point of the half-frame format is that 24x36 of regular film becomes two 18x24 negatives. Load a 36-exposure roll and you walk away with seventy-two pictures.

The D2 sits in the middle of Olympus's early metered PEN line. The order is simple: PEN-D came first with a selenium meter, the D2 followed in 1964 with a CdS cell, and the D3 closed the line in 1965 with a CdS cell and a faster f/1.7 lens. So the D3, not the D2, is the top of the family. What the D2 brought over the original D is that CdS cell, more sensitive in dim light and reading through a window on the front. It is not coupled, so you read the needle, transfer the number, and set the rings yourself. Slow to describe, quick in the hand once you have done it a hundred times.

In the hand it is dense for its size, all metal, and it rides in a jacket pocket without dragging the whole side down. The lens is the F.Zuiko 32mm f/1.9, sharp and contrasty, fast enough to work that night street. Focusing is by scale, no rangefinder patch, so you estimate the distance and lean on the depth of field a wide-ish lens at a small aperture gives you. The leaf shutter runs from about 1/8 up to roughly 1/500, and because it is a leaf shutter it flash-syncs at every speed. A daylight-fill reading from the Zone Light Meter app pairs nicely with that, since you can push your fill flash all the way to the top speed without the focal-plane sync ceiling that plagues SLRs.

The honest weakness is the meter, and the culprit is time. CdS cells from the sixties drift, and the D2 was built for mercury batteries that no longer exist, so the on-board reading is often a stop or two off if it reads at all. Plenty of surviving bodies have a dead or lazy cell. When that happens, an incident or spot reading off your phone covers for the meter the body can no longer run on its own, and you still have the lens and the quiet shutter to work with.

People buy the D2 today for the format, which turns out to be the actual draw rather than a novelty. Half-frame forces you to slow down and edit in-camera, and the vertical-by-default frame suits portraits and street verticals. It cross-shops against the meterless PEN-D and the EE auto models. If you want a real meter window and manual control in something pocket-sized, the D2 is a reasonable pick, but budget for a CLA and confirm the needle against a meter you trust before you rely on it.