Olympus 35 ECR- One Roll Review

Just when I think I have seen most of the small Olympus 35 series cameras, I run into one that's new to me.  I recently came across an Olympus 35 ECR, which is a pretty small rangefinder camera. Not zone-focus, like an Olympus Trip, but a real RF camera, but with absolutely no manual exposure control.  Apparently, this is a rangefinder version of the Olympus 35EC, which was a zone-focus camera with similar features.  The 35 ECR was introduced in 1972, and is a very compact camera for its time.  Olympus was no stranger to producing compact 35mm cameras, especially since they dominated the half-frame market with their series of PEN cameras.  You can download a manual from the Butkus site.

The front of the  35 ECR 

The first thing that I noticed about this camera was its compact size of 11cm x 7cm x 5cm.  Being all-metal, it weighs 430 grams without a roll of film. Pretty heavy for such a small camera. Like most cameras in its class, it has a 42mm f/2.8 lens - neither really wide nor really fast, but actually, perfect for a camera of this sort.  ASA settings are 25-800 (not bad), and the CdS light sensor is located within the front of the lens barrel, so if you use a filter, it will automatically compensate. The downside of this camera is that it originally required two 1.4V RM-640 mercury cells to operate.  I used two 1.5V A 640 Alkaline cells, so the exposure might be a bit off. I have to say, that the battery compartment is pretty robust, taking up a significant portion of the bottom plate of the camera. The rewind lever is also located on the bottom, and the tripod socket on the L side, making for a busy bottom plate, while the top plate is very minimalist. The film advance is a thumbwheel on the back.

The bottom plate is pretty busy.

I happened to have an Olympus lens hood that fits many of the Olympus 35 series cameras, so I attached it before I went out to shoot with it.  I loaded a roll of Ilford XP-2, and shot the roll on one afternoon at the Biltmore Estate in Asheville.  

Using this camera is pretty simple - just focus and shoot.  A small LED lights up to tell you that the battery has enough power to operate the camera, and if it stays on longer as you press the shutter, it means that it is in a low light situation.  There is a lever on the front that looks like a self-timer, but it is not - it's a shutter lock that probably also prevents the 2 alkaline cells from running down when not in use. The shutter is so quiet, that you may not even know that it fired.  Shutter speeds by the way, range from 4 sec to 1/800 sec, and the shutter speed/aperture (f/2.8 - f/13) is automatically set by the camera.  I would prefer that a camera have at least some bit if manual exposure control - either shutter priority or aperture priority, and this one is totally automatic.  If you are looking for that, the 35ECR will certainly be a camera to consider.

I developed the XP-2 in D-76 - yeah, I know that XP-2 is a chromogenic  C-41 film, but it does very well in traditional black and white chemistry. I felt that there was underexposure in all of the frames, but the camera did focus well.  Perhaps setting the ISO to 200 instead of 400 because of the alkaline cells would fix the underexposure.

I don't know how common this model is, but it's the first one that I have seen.  If I was looking for a compact Olympus 35 model, I'd probably go with the 35RC, just because it can be used with or without batteries, and everything is fully manual.    

A few examples from the roll of XP-2. All required some post-work to adjust the brightness.

Of course, the 42mm f/2.8 lens is sharp, and all of the images were perfectly focused.  I think that if I had compensated for the alkaline cells by setting the ISO to 200 instead of 400, it would have resulted in proper exposure.