Olympus PEN EES-2

Load a 36-exposure roll and the EES-2 hands you 72 frames. That was the whole pitch of the PEN line. You shoot two photos in the space a normal 35mm camera burns one, because the EES-2 lays its frames vertically across half the standard gate, 18x24mm a pop. A single cheap roll lasts a weekend, sometimes longer.

The camera is tiny and weighs almost nothing. There is no rangefinder, no split prism, nothing to focus through. You set distance by guessing on a zone scale, the little symbols running from a single head, to a couple, to a group, to a mountain, and the wide 30mm lens at f2.8 forgives most of your guessing. The viewfinder is a bright direct optical window with simple bright lines, no information in it, just a frame and the world. You point and you press.

Exposure is automatic in the loosest sense. A selenium cell rings the lens, no battery anywhere in the body, and it drives a programmed setting between two speeds, roughly 1/40 and 1/200, picking aperture to match. When there is not enough light the shutter locks and a red flag pops into the finder to tell you no. Set the film speed by hand and the meter does the rest. It is a leaf shutter, and its flash setting fires at a fixed 1/40 X-sync with the aperture set by the flash guide number, so daylight fill is genuinely workable on this body. A daylight-fill reading from the Zone Light Meter app pairs with that flash setting when you want to balance a flash against a bright background instead of letting the cell average everything to mud.

Here is the honest weakness, and it is the same one that haunts every selenium camera now over fifty years old. Those cells age. They lose sensitivity slowly and silently, and a tired cell underexposes without ever telling you it has gone soft. Some EES-2 bodies still meter dead accurate. Plenty do not, and there is no battery swap to fix it because there was never a battery. If you buy one, test it against a known meter before you trust a whole roll to it.

People still reach for this camera for what it always was, a pocket snapshot machine with no settings to fuss over and that grainy, close-up half-frame character. Photographers shooting diptychs and contact-sheet sequences gravitate to it because two adjacent frames sit side by side on the negative like a tiny story. It trades against the Olympus Trip 35 in most people's minds, the full-frame sibling with the same selenium soul, and the EES-2 wins on frame count and pocketability while the Trip wins on image size. It costs little, asks for nothing, and still turns out a good picture once you confirm the cell is awake.