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| Olympus ECR I bought this camera more or less by accident. I
thought I was bidding on an Olympus 35 RC - it was up there as a "CR",
which I assumed was a spelling mistake. The chrome finish is superb quality, the leatherette covering is the same material as the old OM1 and OM2s. Let’s start with the lens: it’s a 42mm f-2.8 E-Zuiko - "E" means five elements by Olympus coding. This is the same optic as you’ll find on the more expensive RC. The shutter, a Seiko-ESF leaf shutter, can handle stepless auto exposures from about 4 seconds to 1/800th with no "B" setting. Shutter and aperture are coupled in a light-dependant curve - low light levels leave the aperture wide open and the fastest possible shutter speed, high levels move the aperture smaller and the speed faster in a smooth curve. You don’t really know what you’re getting, but it works! There’s no wind lever, but film is transported by a thumb
wheel. Advancing the film doesn’t actually cock the shutter, it just frees the
shutter release button which cocks and Olympus managed to keep the top of the camera refreshingly uncluttered, and you’ll find the rewind handle on the camera bottom, a la Rollei 35. Back in those days auto-flash units were virtually unknown. Photographers had to struggle with the complex math of dividing guide number by distance to get the f-stop, by which time many subjects would have walked or stalked away! So to solve that problem, Olympus (and many others) included a ring around the lens on which you could set the guide number of your flash, in meters or feet. That ring was coupled to both the aperture and the rangefinder - whatever you focused on would be correctly exposed because the f-stop would be steplessly adjusted for the right distance. Neat, eh? The down side is that it only really works right with direct, on-camera, manual flash. A bounced flash won’t work - it tends to illuminate the room too evenly, apart from the loss of guide number. Since this means using full power for every flash shot, you may have to get used to singing the whole of "God Save The Queen" between shots! The exposure and shutter system is powered by two PX640 mercury batteries - these are gradually becoming extinct. Olympus sensibly placed the metering cell right above the lens but inside the 43mm filter ring, so it’ll read through any filter you put on. A particularly nice feature is the shutter lock on the front panel - by no means the norm for a camera in this class. I’ve primarily used my little ECR with negative film, but the auto exposure system is accurate enough for slides, too. Load up with black & white, put a red filter on, and you’ll find that the slightly wider than normal view of that 42mm lens will compress the clouds a bit for dramatic bad-weather photos. The Olympus lens is a high performer that can knock the socks off most of the modern, plastic, P&S offerings you see today. If you judge this camera not by what it can’t do, but by what it can - effortless photography in a precision built take-anywhere camera - you’ll enjoy it! The camera has a general quality feel to it worthy of something much more sophisticated and expensive.
Copyright © 2001 by Mike Graham. All rights reserved.
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