Last week I happened to come across an Olympus OM-2. My original intention was to re-sell the camera on our Etsy shop, but I decided to take it out for a test-drive before I decided what to do with it for sure.
First off, the OM-2 is small. It's about the same size as my Pentax MX, but even lighter. It feels really nice to hold in your hands, even though my hands are kind of on the large side. One thing I found odd about the OM-2, and actually, all of the OM series cameras, is that both the shutter-speed and aperture selection is located on the lens barrel (The knob on top of the camera is devoted to exposure compensation).
This WOULD make it much easier to adjust your exposure while your eye was to the viewfinder, if the Olympus had a full information viewfinder. One reason I love my MX so much is that you can read the aperture and shutter-speed in the viewfinder. The Olympus only shows shutter-speed, and it only shows you that much in aperture priority mode! In manual mode, all you get is a simple needle; no shutter-speed indicator at all.
The lack of viewfinder information is probably the most frustrating thing about the design of this SLR. Besides that, I quite like the OM-2. The aperture priority mode provides accurate readings, and the focusing screen is very bright. I very much like the placement of the rewind button (on the front of the body rather than on the bottom). Lastly, the 50mm 1.4 Zuiko lens is impressively sharp. I shot a few photos of Katie in our local library using available light at f1.4, and was pleased with both the sharpness of my subject, and the bokeh around her.
Here are the rest of the shots from my roll with the Olympus OM-2. Thanks for looking!
