Olympus XA2

You load it in a dark hallway at a party, thumb the clamshell open, and the lens is already there waiting. The Olympus XA2 lives in a coat pocket. It is the camera you bring when you do not want to bring a camera, and it has a reputation for turning out disposable-feeling but genuinely good party photos. Pull the cover and it wakes up. Slide it shut and the exposure is locked and the lens is protected. That sliding shell does double duty as the on switch and the lens cap, which is half the reason the thing survives years of pocket lint.

This is the simpler sibling to the original XA. Where the XA gave you a rangefinder and aperture priority, the XA2 strips that out for zone focus: a little lever under the lens with three positions, a close pair of heads for portraits, a small group, mountains. You guess the distance, click it into one of the three, and the 35mm lens and its generous depth of field cover your sloppiness. There is no focus patch to line up, no needle to match. You point and you shoot. For a drunk hand at midnight that is exactly right.

Exposure is fully automatic, a program system that picks both aperture and speed off a meter cell by the lens. You get no readout and almost no control, just a low-light warning lamp in the finder. The viewfinder itself is small and squinty by SLR standards, bright enough, with simple frame lines and a green low-light lamp in the corner. The zone you picked is shown on the front slider itself, not in the finder, so you glance down at the lever rather than up at the eyepiece. The leaf shutter runs from a long two seconds down to about 1/750, and because it is a leaf shutter it makes almost no sound, a soft tick rather than a clack. Nobody across the room knows you took the picture.

The honest weakness is the automation itself. You cannot override the program, so a backlit subject or a bright snowfield will fool the meter and there is no exposure compensation dial to fix it. The clip-on A11 flash helps for fill, but switching it on takes the program out of the loop and pins the shutter to a fixed 1/30 of a second. That is where a daylight-fill reading from Zone Light Meter pairs nicely with the body. Meter the ambient scene, then pick an aperture and film speed that balance your subject against that fixed 1/30 flash exposure, and you get fill without blowing out the background.

People still hunt these down. They sell for compact-camera money, well under the cult-tax prices that a Contax T2 or an XA proper now command, and they keep working when fancier electronics from the same decade have died. Light seals go, the battery door corrodes, the foam turns to goo, but the mechanism is stubborn. As a grab-and-go black-and-white street camera, or the thing you hand a friend who has never shot film, the XA2 is hard to beat for the price. It is a one-trick camera, and the one trick is that it disappears into your pocket until you need it.