FILM STARS OM-Wonderful

‘My uncompromising philosophy as a developer was to create cameras that didn’t previously exist anywhere’
- Yoshihisa Maitani

The Olympus OM-1 (the original film model, not the latest same-name digital camera) is 50 years old this year. Its arrival in 1972 put the cat among the pigeons, threw a spanner in the works and generally turned the 35mm single lens reflex (SLR) world on its head. It became a trend-setter whose design knocked on, not just with the Olympus SLRs that followed, but with an influence on many of the company’s competitors too.

Olympus entered the SLR market fairly late with an unremarkable camera called the FTL, launched in 1971. Reminiscent of the Pentax Spotmatic, it used a 42mm screw lens mount and was noteworthy only for its full aperture through-the-lens (TTL) metering, previously assumed impossible with a screw-mount lens. It only sold for a year, but that didn’t faze Olympus because they had a secret weapon up their sleeve in the shape of one of the most ingenious camera designers of his generation. His name was Yoshihisa Maitani, and he had been working on his next big project since 1967.

Maitani joined Olympus in 1956 at the age of 23 and by 1959 had won acclaim for designing the Olympus Pen, Japan’s first 35mm half-frame camera, followed in 1963 by the Pen F half-frame SLR. Later, in 1979, he would design the Olympus XA, which would prove to be another world-beater. But by the start of the 1970s Maitani was well on his way