Compact classic
The revolutionary Olympus XA was the brainchild of Yoshihisa Maitani, Olympus’s famed camera designer and the man who, in a quest to deliver superb quality in a compact form, had previously gifted the world the OM series as well as the Pen half frame cameras.
Yet despite Maitani’s earlier successes, the XA was considered by some to be his greatest achievement and was ground-breaking in so many ways when it was launched in 1979.
Born out of Maitani’s desire to have a camera that could fit in a shirt pocket and be carried anywhere, his innovative clamshell design offered sleek lines as well as protection for the super-sharp 35mm f/2.8 F.Zuiko lens that continued to outperform its peers long after its release. Even today, over 40 years on, it retains its status as one of the best 35mm compact film cameras ever made.
Maitani’s XA was in fact the first of five ‘XA’ cameras to adopt this same design, a concept which was later utilised in Olympus’s hugely popular Mju cameras. As an aperture-priority rangefinder, the pro-spec’d XA is
