A few weeks ago I had the privilege of buying a bunch of Olympus equipment from a nice guy I met over Craigslist. Among the plethora of camera gear I bought from him was an Olympus OM-4; the last main entry in the OM camera line (It came out in 1983). The OM-4 is the successor to the OM-2 (both have electronically controlled shutters), and while it might not have the same classical look as the OM-2, the OM-4 has a few much appreciated improvements.
Probably the best improvement over the OM-2 is the fact that the OM-4 actually has a manual shutter speed! Yes! If your batteries run dry, you can still shoot at 1/60th of a second. It's always nice to have a back-up plan. Other improvements include a faster maximum shutter speed (1/2000th vs 1/1000th), light up display, and a non-removable hot-shoe. There is a whole new advanced metering system where you can aim the camera at your brightest point, and your darkest point, and have it calculate the correct exposure, but I didn't mess with that feature.
I mainly shot in aperture priority mode, and switched to manual mode for a few tricky exposures. I took the OM-4 around with me to some estate sales, and also just played around in my backyard with a 50mm 1:3.5 macro and a 24mm 1:2.8 (plus fisheye adapter). Everything was shot on Ilford XP2 400. Here are my results:
Thanks for looking!
