Olympus PEN EE-2

There is no shutter speed dial, no aperture ring, no focus tab, almost nothing for your fingers to do. You frame, you press, the leaf shutter ticks, and you wind on with a thumb wheel on the back. That is the entire experience of the PEN EE-2, and that simplicity is the whole point. Olympus built it to be the camera you never think about.

It shoots half-frame, two 18x24mm exposures squeezed into every full 35mm frame, so a 36-shot roll gives you 72 pictures. That math is why the PEN line existed. At the end of the 1950s film and processing were expensive in Japan, and Maitani's team made a camera that doubled your roll and fit in a jacket pocket. The EE-2, running from 1968 into the late 1970s, is the cleaned-up version of that idea: the fixed 28mm f/3.5 D.Zuiko lens, the focus-free zone setup that keeps everything from a few feet to infinity acceptably sharp, and a selenium cell ringed around the lens that reads the light and sets exposure for you. The viewfinder is a plain bright-frame window, small but usable, with a red flag that swings up to block the shutter when there is not enough light. No batteries anywhere. The meter runs entirely on the sun hitting that selenium ring.

In the hand it feels like a bar of soap with a lens, light metal and a satisfying density for its size. The leaf shutter is quiet, more a click than a clack, and because it is a leaf shutter it flash-syncs at every speed. There is a manual aperture override on the front ring for using flash bulbs, with the speed pinned around 1/40, but in daylight the camera just runs its program and you let it.

The honest weakness is that selenium cell. Sixty years on, plenty of them have gone weak or dead, and when the cell dies the auto exposure dies with it because there is no manual mode to fall back on. A weak cell underexposes silently, and you do not find out until the lab hands back a roll of thin negatives. This is exactly the body for a handheld reading: meter the scene with the Zone Light Meter app, then flip the front ring to a matching aperture and shoot it like a manual camera at the fixed flash speed. The leaf shutter syncing at every speed also means a daylight-fill flash reading from the app drops right in.

Today the EE-2 is a cult street and travel camera, cheap enough to be a first film body and good enough that people keep it for years. The half-frame format gives you a vertical picture when you hold the camera level, which suits portraits and contact-sheet style diary shooting. The trade is resolution and grain. You are spreading a 35mm frame over half the area, so big enlargements get soft and gritty. People cross-shop it against the Olympus XA and the later auto compacts, but those need batteries. The PEN EE-2 just needs light, and that is most of why it survives.