A few rolls in the Olympus Pen FT 

A blast from my past. In the early 1970s, I concluded that I wanted this Pen F system, buying an FT, 35mm, 100mm, and some intermediate zoom plus maybe a wider lens and some accessories. (In for a penny, ....) I liked it for all of the "pros" mentioned here. I loaded bulk 35mm, so I did not suffer :"long roll". Back then, film image quality was more of an image issue for half frame because we didn't have the modern T-grain films or some of the finer grain developers common today, but quality seemed good enough. When I finally had the time, I took the kit on a trip where its small size and light weight would be a huge advantage. When I got home, I stored the kit for a while, then sold the entire kit. Reasons: The TTL metering system is slow in use and clumsy. Oly adopted the half ass metering system on the FT because the system was originally designed without a meter, and a retrofit with an external meter coupling (think early Nikon) was both impractical and not "cool" looking, a key feature in the lore of the camera. The camera's compact body required a porro mirror reflex finder, which is significantly dimmer than the normal top mounted prism finder on 35mm SLRs. Then, tap off about a 1/3 of that light to run the meter, and you end up with the dimmest viewfinder ever made. IMO if you want to use a Pen F, skip the metered model. Otherwise, it's numerous lenses are mentioned here, but probably half of the system - the more exotic lenses (ex.,40mm 1.;4) - were very expensive new and practically unobtainable used, even 40 years ago. If you want to see what happens when you use this shutter design for a larger format, check out the "Mercury", a US made rangefinder from the late 1940s, which didn't shoot even a full sized 35mm format.

They sell adapters to use modern 675 (1.4V) batteries. Or, you could just make your own insulation ring around the 675 battery (it has a smaller diameter) so that it does not move around. There is also a company that makes a modern battery that has the correct diameter (WeinCell).

Great video and Thanks for the depth review. I have this camera for 2 years and I was very confused about the 0-7 numbers. I always thought that number should be the f number and then got wrong exposure. First time to understand this system and discover the 0-6 number (on 38mm f1.8 lens) at the bottom of the lens. I agree normal meter would be much much much better!

Interesting to hear an in depth review for this one! From my experience you do get used to the lightmeter a little bit over time, but I am also still not a fan of the 0-7 scale for it. I must say I found it quite accurate though. Another thing to point out, the patch where the light enters in the meter is located at the top of the camera. There are lots of separate occasions where the hat I was wearing cast a shadow on that patch and I ended up overexposing my images by quite a bit.

I have a Canon Demi EE17 which is a fixed-lens viewfinder camera (note: not a rangefinder). I dig the half frame format, I use a lot of 24 frame Kodak Gold 200 rolls, and they turn out nice, with twice the amount of shots. I scan my own photos using a Sony a7ii and an old Minolta slide duplicator setup that works a treat. Great video, just found your stuff via Attic Darkroom, excited to watch more stuff!

Hey, amazing video of this fun little camera. Your review is the only one I’ve found so far that covered the diptych scanning issue. If I could make a small request. Could you make a video covering this issue in more detail? I would very much like to retain the two corresponding frames as that’s why I bought this camera. Composing diptych’s is just so appealing to me for some reason. If you could just cover Negative Lab Pro settings/editing the single images separately and then putting them back together. It’s all so confusing!

Great review! I agree with most of it and I don't understand why labs would charge more for scanning single frames? Like, a noritsu does it automatically and pretty fast 🤔

The reason why the rotary shutter wasn't more utilised is an issue of scale, the bigger the resultant image the larger the disk needs to be to cover the whole image area its not tenable for anything larger than 1/2 frame