TWO TINY TYRANTS FROM THE LAND OF THE RISING YEN
The OM-1n and the OM-2n may look like identical twins separated at a Tokyo christening — both diminutive, both clad in the same handsome black-and-chrome funeral suit, both bearing the fingerprints of Yoshihisa Maitani, a man who clearly believed every other camera designer on Earth was an endearing also-ran visualising shoeboxes for giants. But press them to your eye and the differences emerge like Scientologists at a Tom Cruise convention.
Take the OM-1n first, since it is the elder and, like most elders in the Labour Party , refuses to die. It is entirely mechanical, which the purists will tell you in reverent tones, as though clockwork were an ethical stand rather than a series of geometrically amplifying maintenance bills. Drop the battery in a fjord, freeze it in a Siberian latrine, and the shutter will still clatter away at 1/1000th with the smug inevitability of a Victorian church organ — because the meter is the only part that needs feeding. And feed it you must, originally on a mercury cell of a voltage now banned by every right-thinking government for being approximately as toxic as Bernard Manning’s after-dinner repertoire. So you’ll faff with adapters, or hand-meter like a Boy Scout, and pretend this is “character” rather than the camera slowly relegating itself to the back of the camera date-night queue.
The match-needle finder, mind, is a thing of genuine beauty — vast, luminous, the optical equivalent of stepping from a coal cellar into the Sistine Chapel. Maitani gave the OM line a viewfinder so bright that lesser SLRs, by comparison, appear to have been designed by a mole with a propensity to conjunctivitis.
Now the OM-2n, the clever one, the one that was the first in its family to go to university and never lets you forget it. It does aperture-priority automation — you set the hole, it sets the time — and it does so via a party trick called off-the-film metering, in which the camera reads the light reflecting off the actual shutter curtain and film during the exposure, in real time, recalculating like a panicking accountant as the clouds shift. Genuinely, properly ingenious. It’ll hold an automatic exposure open for two full minutes if the night demands it, and meter a flash off the film plane with such cool precision that you’ll forgive it almost anything.
The OM-1n, by contrast, asks nothing of anyone and has built an entire smug personality around the fact, like the sort who tells you, unprompted, that they don’t own a television. The OM-2n is the cleverer of the two and never lets it lie — right up until the cells expire, at which point it discovers, too late, that being clever was never quite the same as being loved.
A shared lunacy unites them, incidentally, and I cannot let it pass: Maitani in his wisdom put the shutter-speed ring around the lens mount, down where the focus and aperture already live, so that all three controls cluster on the barrel like commuters fighting for a single Tube pole. Devotees call this “ergonomic genius.” I call it the work of a man living in denial of the opposable thumb.
The verdict? Buy the OM-1n if you romanticise hardship, distrust batteries, and fancy yourself the last honest man at the apocalypse. Buy the OM-2n if you’d like the camera to do the thinking while you concentrate on the gin. Buy both, and you have officially become the sort of person I’ve spent this entire column mocking — in which case, welcome. The flagellants meet on Thursdays……
