![]() ![]() This iron bowstring pony truss bridge dates to around 1900 and was originally part of a longer bridge that spanned a creek in Montgomery County. I loaded some expired Kodak Gold 200 and went a shootin’. Or check out all of my camera reviews here. If you like point-and-shoot 35mm cameras, also check out my reviews of the Canon AF35ML ( here), the Kodak VR35 K40 ( here), the Nikon Zoom Touch 400 ( here), the Olympus Stylus Epic Zoom 80 ( here), the Olympus µ(mju:) Zoom 140 ( here), and the Pentax IQZoom EZY ( here). Press the shutter button down halfway to let the camera focus and set exposure, and the rest of the way to take the photo. Slide the front cover back to turn the camera on. An LCD panel atop the camera counts down frames, indicates the flash mode, and tells you how much charge is left on the CR123A battery, which the Stylus needs to run everything. It includes an electronic self-timer and a tiny flash that you can set to fill and to reduce red eye. The Stylus automatically advances and rewinds the film. Olympus claims the Stylus has an “active multi-beam 100-step autofocus system,” whatever that means. It reads the DX coding on the film canister to set ISO from 50 to 3200. I don’t know how far down the lens stops, but the shutter operates from 1/15 to 1/500 second. ![]() It sets exposure for you there is no manual control. The Stylus packs a 35mm f/3.5 lens, of three elements in three groups. When I mentioned in an earlier post that the Stylus was on my short list, he e-mailed to say that he had several of them sitting around doing nothing, and that he’d just send me one. I thank reader Derek Wong (see his film photography blog here) for donating this little camera to the Jim Grey Collection. That’s probably just as well, because the average American probably couldn’t pronounce µ anyway. As sometimes happens in the camera world, the µ got a different name for the American market: Stylus. In most of the world, Olympus gave its small camera a small name: µ, the prefix for “micro” in scientific measurements. But when Maitani delivered a camera no bigger than a bar of soap, he delivered another small winner for Olympus. Olympus was very late to that party of good-quality point-and-shoots upon the Stylus’s 1991 debut. Maitani then turned his attention to shrinking the 35mm point-and-shoot camera. He spent his career at Olympus shrinking cameras, actually, first the 35mm SLR (the OM-1 see mine here) and then the 35mm rangefinder camera (the XA see mine here). He designed the camera you see below, the Olympus Stylus. All hail Yoshihisa Maitani, the master of photographic miniaturization. ![]()
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