Olympus XA4 Macro

Reach into a jacket pocket on a crowded street, slide the clamshell open with your thumb, and the meter is already awake before the cover finishes its travel. That gesture is the whole XA series, and the XA4 Macro is the version Olympus built for people who wanted to get close and go wide at the same time. The lens is a 28mm, the widest of any XA, and it focuses down to about a foot, which is unusual for a pocket camera from 1985. The wrist strap is knotted at fixed lengths so you can hold it taut against your subject and read off the rough focus distance, a clever fix for a camera that has no rangefinder.

Because there is no rangefinder, you set focus by guessing the distance on a little zone scale, and the wide lens forgives you for it. The 28mm and the program meter do the rest. In good light the camera leans on small apertures, so depth of field runs deep; in plain daylight almost everything from a few feet to the horizon lands inside it, which covers for the missing rangefinder. The viewfinder is a simple bright-line affair, not the patch-and-overlay system of the original XA, and it shows you the 28mm frame with parallax marks for the close stuff. Exposure is fully programmed. A CdS cell on the lens ring reads the light and the camera picks both shutter and aperture, so your only real input is focus and whether the optional A11 flash is clipped on.

The leaf shutter runs from a long two seconds down to around 1/750, and because it is a leaf shutter it syncs flash at every speed. That matters more than it sounds. You can shoot fill flash in bright sun without the sync-speed ceiling that strangles a focal-plane camera, so a backlit face at noon gets the light it needs instead of dropping into silhouette. When the programmed meter gets fooled by that kind of high-contrast scene, a spot or incident reading from the Zone Light Meter app lets you decide where the shadows fall and adjust, instead of trusting the cell to average a hard scene into mud, and that daylight-fill reading pairs straight into the leaf shutter's all-speed sync.

The honest weakness is the same one that haunts every XA. It runs on two LR44 cells and it will not fire without them. No battery, no photograph, full stop. The light seals turn to tar with age, the clamshell rails can get gritty, and the wide lens, while sharp in the center, softens noticeably in the corners wide open. This was never a precision instrument the way a Contax T was. It was a camera you could carry all day and forget was in the pocket until you needed it.

Today the XA4 is the cult pick of the family. Collectors chase the original rangefinder XA, but the wide 28mm and the close focus make the XA4 the one street and travel shooters actually keep loaded. Prices climbed hard once the point-and-shoot craze hit, and a clean one with working seals now costs real money. People cross-shop it against the Ricoh GR1 and the Nikon 28Ti, both of which cost far more. Buy the XA4 for the focal length and the size, accept that you are trusting a forty-year-old program meter, and carry a real reading for the shots that matter.