Olympus XA

Yoshihisa Maitani, who had already done the Pen, the Pen F and the OM-1, set a target: a full-frame 35mm camera no more than four centimetres thick. That one number decides everything else about the XA. It forced a reverse-retrofocus lens with a 33.6mm back focus so the barrel would not have to telescope out, and it forced the clamshell cover, which replaces the ever-ready case and doubles as the on-off switch. It also needed rare-earth magnets to control the shutter accurately at that size. Shown at Photokina in 1978, on sale from May 1979 at about two hundred dollars. It won a Good Design Grand Prize. The thing to understand before buying one is that the XA is the only one of its family with a coupled rangefinder. The XA2, XA3 and XA4 are zone-focus cameras with a programmed automatic and no aperture control; the XA1 is fixed focus with a selenium cell and no battery at all. They are cheaper cameras sold below the XA, not successors to it. Sellers mix them up constantly, and the price difference is large. The lens is the usual point of praise — a 35mm f/2.8 in six elements that people rate among the best compact camera lenses ever made, with the honest caveats of barrel distortion, vignetting wide open and softness at f/2.8. Prices tell their own story: a mint example went for under fifty dollars around 2017 and now sits in the low hundreds and above.

Pocket carry, genuinely. 102 by 64.5 by 40 millimetres and 225 grams, and no case to open. Street and travel, where aperture priority with real rangefinder accuracy in something the size of a pack of cards is hard to beat. Night work. The shutter runs to ten seconds on automatic, which is far more than most compacts of the period offer. Anyone who wants to choose the aperture. This is the one XA that lets you. Where it falls short: no manual exposure at all. f/2.8 is not fast. The top speed is 1/500. The rangefinder patch is small and dim by design and gets worse with age, which is the commonest complaint about the camera and a real problem in low light. The release is a feather-touch bar that fires in a pocket. In flash mode both aperture and speed are fixed, at f/4 and about 1/30. The only exposure compensation is a single fixed plus one and a half stops for backlight. And it is entirely battery-dependent.

Slide it fully open and let go. It must stay open and stay put when you tilt the camera. The cover is also the power switch, so one that will not latch fully open is a dead camera — and the cause is usually a lost bearing, see below. Also look for dents in the cover, which cause light leaks and transport trouble.

Two fresh silver-oxide cells, then set the control lever to CHECK. A beeper and a lamp mean the circuit is alive. Silence means dead cells, cells in the wrong way round, or bad contacts.

It is an electronic bar with almost no travel, so there is nothing to feel. Fire it ten times at a range of light levels and listen for the shutter each time.

Point at a vertical edge against the sky. You should see two images separate and merge as you move the focus lever. Check the small front rangefinder window opens and closes with the main cover — if it is stuck shut there is no second image at all. If the two images never merge, or merge at the wrong distance, it needs adjustment, and that is a technician's job on this camera.

Open the back and run a fingertip along the door channels. Black smear means they are gone. Any XA of this age should be assumed to need them — the foam Olympus used goes unusually gummy.

Wind through five or six frames with the back closed and watch it step. A counter jammed at S is a known fault.

Remove the battery cover and press the cell. You should feel spring resistance and it should spring back. Free movement means the contact inside is bent or broken.

Most cameras sent for repair are not broken. Put a fresh set in before you conclude anything, and do it before you test any other fault on this page, because tired cells imitate half of them. Use ordinary alkaline cells, not rechargeables. Not because rechargeables damage anything — they do not, and one or two makers supplied their own rechargeable packs — but because of three things that all read as a broken camera. A nickel-metal-hydride cell is 1.2 volts against an alkaline's 1.5, so six of them give 7.2 volts where the camera expects 9. A battery check built for alkalines reads that as flat. A meter calibrated at 1.5 volts reads the light wrong at 1.2. And ordinary rechargeables lose ten to fifteen per cent of their charge every month sitting in a drawer, so a camera used three times a year is dead every time you pick it up, where alkalines lose two or three per cent in a year. If you want rechargeables anyway, use low-self-discharge cells, charge them the week you shoot, and trust the battery check less. Never mix old and new cells, or two chemistries, in one camera. And take them out when you put the camera away: a leaking cell is the commonest way a working camera becomes a dead one.

Cartridges do jam, and it is not always the camera. Shooters have reported cartridges that would not advance in one body and ran perfectly in another, and the same fault following the cartridge rather than the camera across different models. The test takes ten seconds and settles it. Take the cartridge out, mark the film through the front window with a permanent pen, put it back, run the camera two or three seconds, and take it out again. If the mark has gone, the film moved. Three separate labs give that same test. Then swap. Try a different cartridge in the same camera, or the same cartridge in a different camera. One bad roll points at the cartridge. Three bad rolls point at the camera. Things that mislead people: the footage counter can move while the film does not, so it proves nothing on its own. And check each roll reads EXPOSED at the end before you send it off. If it jams, do not open the cartridge. You cannot inspect it without fogging the film, and you destroy both the footage and the evidence. Send it to the lab anyway — they open it in darkness and can often recover what was shot. Kodak runs a feedback form for cartridges, and some sellers will replace a jammed one. One popular explanation is worth correcting: the story that Vision3 stocks jam because their base is thicker, being designed for 16mm and 35mm. Kodak's own data describes the 35mm and Super 8 versions of a stock identically and publishes no base thickness at all. The only documented difference is between negative and reversal film, and the lab that documents it says the thicker negative helps rather than hurts. The jams that are documented were on reversal stock.

The sliding cover rides in a groove in the bottom plate and is located by a tiny cylindrical roller bearing. It escapes easily if the door is ever removed or the camera is dropped, and the cover then will not stay open — which, since the cover is the power switch, means the shutter will not fire. Owners have replaced it successfully with a cut-down lighter flint, a filed ballpoint pen tip, the plastic tube from an ink cartridge, or a piece of toothpick. It is a home fix, but it needs the bottom plate off and a steady hand, and taking the door off is exactly when the bearing gets lost.

Two opposite failures. It can go dead: pressed too hard it deforms, and if it is not perfectly flat underneath it does not trip the shutter — the fix is to remove the bar, which is glued on, and lightly sand the underside flat. Or it can become a hair trigger, firing frames by itself in a pocket, which is a known complaint about the camera rather than a fault of one example. The sanding fix is a home job. A worn-out switch beneath it is not.

Access is through the baseplate, five screws. The contacts are known to be finicky, which is precisely why Olympus built in the audible battery check. Clean with isopropyl and a fibreglass pen; spread corrosion is a technician's job.

Partly inherent, partly dirt. The patch is small and dim by design and gets worse with age. Careful cleaning of the rangefinder optics helps, particularly the window that goes to the mirror, where grime accumulates despite the cover. There is also a non-invasive trick that two independent sources describe: darken the centre of the eyepiece with a small square of tape or a felt-tip dot. You then focus by matching edges rather than by looking for a bright patch, and contrast improves.

The XA uses a different and worse foam than most cameras of the period, and it fails badly. Replacing it with felt cut from a film canister and bonded with contact adhesive is the approach owners settle on. A classic home fix.

Two 1.5 volt silver-oxide cells, SR44 or equivalent. Olympus's manual is explicit that alkaline-manganese and lithium batteries are not to be used, and that instruction is worth following even though plenty of owners report getting away with alkaline: silver oxide holds a nearly flat voltage across its life, where an alkaline's slopes, so the meter drifts as the cell ages and drifts by different amounts at different points. The cells are still made. Do not fit rechargeable button cells — they sit below 1.5 volts nominal and the camera was specified for 1.5.

Two documented faults. The flat spring contact inside bends or breaks after a knock, the cell rattles and the flash will not fire. And some units charge audibly but often do not fire, which is widely reported and, as far as we can find, undiagnosed. Not a fault but worth knowing: recycle time is thirty to forty-five seconds on an alkaline AA and about nine seconds on a lithium one.