The Film Retriever

Such a beauty! This is a review of the Olympus OM4 - a camera I bought on a car boot sale a few months ago for the grand total of £9 including a G-Zuiko 35-70 f/3.5-4.5. The OM4 hit the shops in 1983. It was meant to replace the classic OM2n by giving it a more modern touch. The OM3/OM4 had a few updates (T for the US market and Ti for the rest of the world) both of them updating features like battery consumption, high speed flash synchronization and adding a Titanium frame. Whilst the OM4 sold well in it's different versions, it's sibling, the OM3, was a commercial disaster. Few were sold due to the extortionate prices for what it was essentially an OM1 with a spot metering - these cameras command now high prices in the second hand market. The spot buttons The OM4 feels so familiar. If you ever held an OM2 then you know that this is unmistakably it's sibling. There are a few changes though. Next to the advance lever there are the spot button...

Pretty little things... The xi series was Minolta's nemesis. The 7xi was greeted as a technological marvel, it's announcement was written on newspapers of that time as it introduced "fuzzy logic" - a 90's way of refering to artificial intelligence. Minolta spend millions of dollars for the development of the camera with part of its technology being used in the rest of the xi cameras. And yet, those cameras did not bring in the revenue Minolta expected. The xi series was deemed as full of unnecessary features, overcomplicated, with high battery consumption and no extensive line of exotic lenses. This was a blow for Minolta that saw their sales plumbing behind Canon and Nikon.   The Minolta 7xi The Minolta 7xi As already said, the Minolta 7xi was hailed as a technological marvel back in 1991 with technology still used in modern Sony digital cameras. The 16bit RISK chip set integrated focusing and metering. It was able to distinguish...

The Mighty 35SE This is a review of the Rollei 35SE - a camera that was generously donated to me back in December. There are very few cameras that I can think of that attract the controversy that the Rollei 35 does. All these for a good reason, it is quirky, it is finely made and it is a viewfinder camera, meaning that you have to guess the distance. And this is usually where everything goes wrong. There is no shortage of information online about these cameras, Wikipedia and 35mmc websites are the places to start if you want to know more about the ins and outs of this camera plus a bucket load of historical information that led to the creation of this camera.But I will limit this review down to the user experience.  Rumors have it that the Queen ditched the Leica for the Rollei Once you pick the camera up you notice the small square-ish size of it. With the lens collapsed it easily fits in a jacket pocket. Another thing straight away obvious: the fil...