Olympus PEN FT

Yoshihisa Maitani wanted an SLR with no hump. He got it by turning the shutter sideways. The original PEN F arrived in 1963 as the first half-frame single-lens reflex anyone had built, and instead of a pentaprism perched on top he routed the image through a porro-prism system tucked into the space the half-frame format frees up beside the lens. The result is a flat-topped little metal slab that looks more like a rangefinder than a reflex. In 1966 Olympus added a meter and called it the PEN FT, and that is the one most people end up with today.

The signature is the shutter. It is a rotary disc, a spinning titanium blade thin enough to sound like nothing, and because it sweeps past the gate rather than slitting across it the flash syncs at every speed, all the way up to the top mark near 1/500. The mirror is barely there and there is no curtain shuffle. You press the release and the camera makes a soft mechanical tick, which is exactly what you want when you are working a crowd a few feet away and would rather nobody noticed.

Then there is the metering, which is the part that divides people. The FT carries an uncoupled TTL CdS cell, and uncoupled is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The needle in the finder points at a number from 0 to 7, and you have to read that number and turn it by hand onto a matching scale on the lens barrel before you shoot. It works, in a fussy two-handed way, but the cell also pulls some of the light off via a half-mirror on its way to your eye, so the viewfinder runs a touch dimmer than the meterless PEN F or FV. In a dark bar you will miss the original's brighter screen.

Loading is ordinary 35mm, and you get roughly seventy-two frames on a 36-exposure roll because each image is the vertical half of a normal frame. That is the whole pitch. Double the shots, a camera that disappears in a jacket pocket, and a bank of tiny PEN F lenses that are genuinely sharp. It built a cult among travel and street shooters for exactly those reasons, and the prices have climbed accordingly. Cross-shop it against the Pen FV if you do not care about the meter, since you keep the brighter finder and lose the dim cell.

The honest weakness is that meter again. The CdS cells are sixty years old now, the mercury batteries they were designed around are gone, and a tired cell reads lazily or not at all in low light. Plenty of FT bodies in the wild meter somewhere between optimistic and dead. The clean fix is to ignore it. Take an incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app, place your shadows where you want them, and dial the aperture straight onto the lens, which skips the whole transfer-the-number dance the camera asks of you. The shutter and the optics are the reason to own one. Let the app be the meter the FT can no longer trust itself to be.