Olympus XA3

The XA was a true rangefinder, a coupled patch you turned a little lever to align, and people who learned on it never forgave Olympus for what came after. The XA3 dropped the rangefinder for zone focus, three little symbols on the lens barrel: a single figure, a group of figures, a mountain. You guess the distance, you click the wheel, you shoot. Purists groaned. Everybody else got a camera that was almost impossible to get wrong.

It is tiny. The whole thing lives behind a clamshell cover that you slide open with one thumb, and the act of opening it wakes the meter and uncaps the lens in a single motion. Closed, it is a smooth lozenge that disappears in a coat pocket. There is no leather, no heft, no ceremony. It feels like a toy until you carry it for a week and realize it goes everywhere your real cameras stay home.

The lens is a 35mm f/3.5, and the camera runs fully programmed automatic exposure, which on the XA3 mostly means you set it and forget it. The leaf shutter ranges from a long two seconds down to about 1/750, and because it is a leaf shutter it flash-syncs at every speed, which is the whole point of the clip-on A11 flash that matches it. The finder is the simplified XA2-line type: bright, plain, no analog needle scale down the side like the original rangefinder XA gave you. You frame, you trust the auto exposure, you fire. The 3 in the name marks the main change over the XA2, which was DX coding so the camera reads the film speed off the cassette instead of leaving it to you.

Where it bites you is focus, full stop. Zone focusing at f/3.5 in dim light is a coin flip past a few feet, and the meter will happily pick a slow shutter speed that turns a handheld frame to mush before you notice. Indoors without the flash, treat it as a careful camera, not a snapshot one. The light seals also rot like every plastic compact of the era, so a cheap one often needs ten dollars of foam before it stops fogging.

People cross-shop it against the XA2 and the more capable XA, and the honest read is that the XA3 splits the family down the middle: more automation than the XA2, without the coupled rangefinder of the original. Prices have crept up because every pocketable point-and-shoot has, but it is still the cheap end of the line, the one most people grab as a true carry-everywhere body. For the contrasty stuff the averaging meter fumbles, a backlit street scene or a face against a bright window, take a quick spot reading with the Zone Light Meter app and place the shadows where you want them, then set your aperture and let the leaf shutter sort out the rest.