My first camera was an Olympus OM-1 – my father bought it for me in 1977. I loved that camera, because it (and its lenses!) was (were) small en light compared to the cameras of the big photo industry names at that time. I parted with it after the birth of our son: trying to shoot good pictures of a children without auto-focus capacity was too hard for me ;-)
Don’t ask me why I preferred this model over one from a more established SLR produces like Nikon or Canon – I can’t remember how the decision was made. But I never regretted owning and using it. In fact, today I only regret having parted with it!
So there I was with that svelte and light camera. What I did not know was that the designers of the OM-1 originally imagined a completely different device! Kosmo Foto tells the story: “This is what the Olympus OM-1 could have looked like“. The OM-X system was meant to produce a modular camera, somewhat like the Hasselblad system but for 35mm film.
Luckily for me, Olympus did not start selling that system: I would never have been able to afford it (or let’s say that my father probably would not have spent money on that). I would have loved to play with it, just as I once dreamed of buying a second-hand Hasselblad… but never did – toys like that are too expensive for me.
What does surprise me, is that such a system has not yet been produced now that the “back” of such a camera can be a lot simpler in mechanical terms. Shouldn’t that be easier in this digital age?
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