Olympus D.Zuiko 40mm f/2.8 (Trip 35 fixed)

Stop the Trip 35 down to f/8 in daylight and this little four-element lens snaps to a kind of crisp, slightly warm rendering that has nothing soft about it. That is the Tessar fingerprint. Sharp dead center, a touch of fall-off in the corners wide open, and a contrast curve that leans punchy rather than gentle. People mistake the Trip for a toy because it is small and the camera does the thinking. The glass does not deserve that reputation.

The D.Zuiko 40mm is a Tessar-type design, four elements in three groups, and Olympus built it to feed a fully automatic selenium-meter camera that needed no battery. The D in D.Zuiko follows Olympus's old convention where the letter's position in the alphabet equals the element count, so D means four. Olympus used the same scheme across its lineup (F.Zuiko meant six elements, G.Zuiko seven) until it dropped the letters once multicoating arrived during the OM-system years. At 40mm the lens sits between a true normal and a mild wide, a focal length that frames most of what is in front of you without making you back up or step in. On a leaf shutter the whole thing is nearly silent. The Trip only offers two real speeds behind the program (roughly 1/40 and 1/200), so this is not a lens you reach for to freeze fast action, and that two-speed limitation is the honest weakness. You get what the meter gives you, and in dim light it simply parks at the slow speed and the f/2.8 aperture.

Wide open at f/2.8 the rendering goes a little glowy and the corners soften, which flatters faces and looks lovely on color negative film. Stopped to f/5.6 or f/8 it tightens into the sharp, slightly clinical look that landscape and street shooters actually want from a Tessar. Bokeh is unremarkable, neither swirly nor especially creamy, because a 40mm f/2.8 on 35mm just does not throw much out of focus. Flare resistance is modest by modern standards; shoot into a low sun and you will catch veiling haze, so a hand over the front element earns its keep.

Who buys it: people who want a competent point-and-shoot that costs less than a roll-and-a-half of film, and people who already know the Tessar look and want it in a pocket camera. The cross-shop is usually the Rollei 35 (the base model uses a Tessar-type 40mm f/3.5, and only the later 35S/SE got the five-element Sonnar f/2.8), with its fiddlier scale focus and a higher price on the used market. Konica and Yashica fixed-lens rangefinders come up too. The Trip wins on price and on the no-battery selenium meter, which still works on most surviving copies if the cell has not died.

One practical note for shooters who pull the Trip off auto. Move the aperture ring off A to a manual f-stop, which is exactly what the camera intends for flash, and the shutter locks to a single fixed 1/40. Because it is a leaf shutter, flash still syncs cleanly at that 1/40, unlike a focal-plane camera that loses sync above roughly 1/60. There is no other manual speed to choose. So bring it onto Zone Light Meter, set the aperture for your flash guide number, and the leaf fires at 1/40, full stop. That, plus the f/2.8 to f/22 range, is the whole exposure story on this lens. Good enough that you quit apologizing for it once the first roll comes back.