Olympus PEN EES

The leaf shutter on a PEN EES barely clicks. It is a soft snap you can lose in a noisy room, and that quietness is the whole point of a half-frame camera built to disappear in a coat pocket. Olympus designed the PEN line to put two frames where one used to go, splitting each 35mm exposure into an 18x24mm vertical. A 36-exposure roll becomes 72. For a student or a traveler in the early sixties, that math meant fewer film changes and a cheaper habit, and the EES took that idea and ran with it.

This is the automatic one. The "EE" stands for electric eye, the selenium meter cell ringed around the lens that drives the exposure without a battery. You set the film speed, frame, and shoot. The cell reads the light, the camera picks the aperture and shutter speed on its own, and when there is not enough light a little red flag pops up in the finder to tell you the shot will not happen. There is no rangefinder. The EES uses zone focus, a few clicks on the lens barrel for symbols like a single person, a group, or a mountain, and the small fast lens covers the depth of field so a rough guess stays sharp.

The finder is a plain bright-line window, simple and direct, with no patch to align and no needle to chase. You compose, you fire, the leaf shutter does its quiet work. And because that shutter is a leaf, flash syncs at every speed, which is more useful than it sounds when you want a touch of daylight fill. These things are dense little blocks of metal for their size, and a clean one feels far more serious than the price suggests. The fixed lens is sharp, contrasty, and well corrected, which is part of why the half-frame compromise rarely looks like one on a print.

The weakness is the meter, and it is the same weakness on every selenium camera of this age. The cell needs no battery, but it does age. Sixty years of light fatigue the selenium, and a cell that reads a stop or two slow will quietly overexpose every frame while the red flag stays politely down. A failed cell leaves the automatic exposure unreliable, sometimes pinned, sometimes just wrong, though the EES does give you a manual aperture setting, which fixes the shutter speed, as a fallback. Test before you trust it, and budget for the fact that a tired cell cannot be recharged, only replaced.

When the eye goes dim, you lose the automatic program and are left with that manual aperture at a fixed shutter speed, so you shoot it like a hand-set body. Take an incident or spot reading off the scene with the Zone Light Meter app, then set the speed and aperture you actually want from there. Today the EES trades cheap, the half-frame curiosity people buy for the doubled frame count and the pocketability, cross-shopped against the scale-focus PEN-S and the later EE-3. It is not a precision instrument. It is a small machine for shooting a lot of frames quickly, and on a working cell it still does exactly that.