Olympus PEN W

About 72 frames out of a 36-exposure roll, in a body you can close your hand around. That is the half-frame trade, and the PEN W makes it feel deliberate rather than cheap. You shoot a whole vacation and develop one roll. Half-frame splits each 35mm frame down the middle into an 18x24mm vertical, so the camera that travels lightest also runs longest between cartridge changes, and you stop counting shots the way you do with a normal compact. A 24-exposure roll gives you somewhere near 48.

This is the wide one in the PEN family, the W standing for the 25mm lens bolted to the front. On half-frame that 25mm gives a field of view in the neighborhood of a 35mm lens on full frame, so it is not a dramatic wide angle, just an honest everyday view that leans a touch roomier than the standard PEN's. The lens is fixed, no swapping, and the whole package is built around the idea that you point and walk. Olympus made this version for a short stretch in the mid-sixties, and far fewer of them left the factory than the plain PEN, which is most of why a clean W costs real money today while a beat-up half-frame Olympus does not.

No meter. You set the aperture and the shutter speed yourself, by eye or by guess, and the camera does nothing to help. The leaf shutter runs a modest range, from around an eighth of a second up to about 1/250 at the top, which is plenty for daylight and the reason this thing has no business in low light without a steady hand and a slow film. Being a leaf shutter, it flash-syncs at every speed, so a daylight-fill reading from the Zone Light Meter app pairs cleanly with that sync flexibility when you want to balance a small flash against an open sky.

Focusing is scale only. You judge the distance, twist the lens to the matching mark, and trust it. The wide-ish lens and small format give you generous depth of field, so zone-focusing at f/8 covers a lot of sins, but there is no rangefinder patch and no ground glass to confirm anything. The viewfinder is a plain bright-line window, simple and direct, with no focusing aid because there is nothing to focus by. Film loading is the usual bottom-and-back PEN routine, and the build is dense little metal that has aged better than most plastic from forty years later.

The honest weakness is the one already named: no meter and no rangefinder means the camera assumes you already know how to expose and estimate distance. Get either wrong and the frame is gone, and on half-frame you will not even notice until the whole roll comes back. People still buy the W for exactly what it is, a pocketable wide that runs film a long way and feels solid in the palm, and they cross-shop it against the Rollei 35 and the other PEN variants. It is not a beginner's safety net. It is a deliberate little tool for someone who likes deciding everything themselves.