Fujica ST701: Birthing Scandal Pond-Pool

Ninety million years ago I had fun with some pre-flashed film, and although the Fujica ST605 that I used back then is long-gone I still have some M42 lenses. By chance a Fujica ST701 fell into my hands, so I decided to try it out.

Despite the number, the ST701 was actually the ST605's predecessor. Its posher, smaller, generally more sophisticated predecessor. The specification was typical of the period - top speed 1/1000th, uncoupled electronic TTL metering, manual everything - but the body was smaller than the competition and the meter was apparently more accurate. Alas for Fuji it was launched shortly before the Olympus OM, which was even smaller and smarter. On the whole Fuji's film SLRs didn't leave much of a mark, and nobody remembers them nowadays. They were, I imagine, tangential to the company's film business (the firm's digital SLRs, on the other hand, were frustratingly brilliant).

Unfortunately the ST701 uses long-discontinued mercury batteries, so I had to use a hand-held meter, which was a bother. The camera itself is all-manual, and the battery only powers the meter. Fujica's standard lens was a 55mm f/1.8, slightly narrower than the typical 50mm.

I also used a Unitor 28mm f/2.8 which I got for nothing. It's so soft in the corners at f/2.8 that it's almost endearing. I can't fault it for the massive vignetting - I used a polarising filter - but as a full-frame lens it was worth every penny I paid for it:

Here's what it looks like:

On the positive side the lens looks lovely, with a distinctively blue cast to the coating, and it's built solidly out of metal. The weight is such that if you wanted to drown your neighbour's pet tortoise for your own sexual gratification you could use it to weigh the bag down. Imagine a tortoise slowly drowning, kicking its legs futility as it sinks to the bottom of Hampstead Heath's ladies' pond; imagine tying its legs together or encasing it in a plastic bag so that it can't move. Imagine that. The things you find in the darker corners of LiveLeak.

It's Japanese, the lens is Japanese. It was also sold under the Uni, Photax-Paragon, Revue, Pentor, and Eyemik(!) names. It seems to have originally been built by a company called Mitake, which crumbled to dust long ago.

My ST701 has rusty spots and the light seals had fallen apart, and I don't trust the 1s setting, but otherwise it works just as it did in 1971. In 2015 ancient M42 match-needle SLRs are essentially junk, doubly so in ST701's case unless you happen to be a rabid Fuji collector. The 55mm f/1.8 standard lens is lovely but has a boring specification. Here's what it looks like:

I can't stop thinking about that tortoise. They don't feel pain; they're basically vegetables. Here's how the lens performs versus a modern Canon 50mm f/1.4, which is faster and just slightly wider. It's not really a fair comparison, because f/1.8 is wide open for the Fuji lens, stopped-down for the Canon, but life isn't fair. Life is in fact cruel. Large animals eat smaller animals; adult bears and hippos and rats kill their children whenever the watering hole becomes too crowded, and human beings are essentially animals.

In the middle of the frame the two lenses are soft but usable one stop down, reaching a peak at f/5.6, with the Canon lens generally better overall:

Fujinon 55mm f/1.8 at f/1.8, f/2.8, f/5.6, f/8

Canon 50mm f/1.4 EF at f/1.8, f/2.8, f/5.6, f/8

In the corner the Fuji lens isn't great at f/1.8 or f/2.8, but jumps up a notch at f/5.6 and essentially becomes sharp across the frame at that aperture, notably without any CA:

Whereas the Canon lens - bought brand-new earlier this year - isn't quite as consistent (again, f/1.8, f/2.8, f/5.6, f/8):

If this little test demonstrates anything, it's that standard 50mm-55mm lens design hasn't progressed all that much in half a century. Over the last few years there has been a mini-explosion of posh fast 50mm lenses, but even nowadays the best and most expensive 50mm - the Zeiss Otus seems to be the modern benchmark - are only incrementally better than their distant predecessors.

What film did I use? It was some long-expired Boots 200-speed film that appears to be rebadged Fuji Superia, judging by the code on the negative. It was a nice sunny day.

Olympus OM-1

It used to be that people moved to the shining city on the hill, lived in squalor, did the work, saved up, and then bought houses and became the general population; but that's all broken. Now people live in squalor, do the work, work in squalor, never earn enough to save, never earn enough to leave a mark, live in squalor, die in squalor. Their bodies are thrown into a mass grave. Repeat.

An OM-1n (left) next to an OM-2n, its auto-exposure brother.

Just like New York. And New York still exists and is an economic powerhouse, and Rio de Janeiro still exists and has its favelas, which still exist, and if that model works why not London? Why not everywhere? For thirty years Belfast was a war zone of barricades and petrol bombs, but Britain survived; what does it matter if poor people kill each other? They breed, and some of them are good-looking.

And Detroit and Chicago, there are bubbles within bubbles. The counteracting force of gentrification simply pushes poverty off the edge of the page, where it becomes invisible. The inner-city slums become suburban slums, and then the wasteland, with the shining city on the hill not a beacon of hope but a meat grinder.

Today we're going to look at the Olympus OM-1, which was launched with great fanfare in 1972. It was Olympus' first heartfelt stab at making a conventional 35mm SLR, and was very influential in its day. On a conceptual level it was a bit like the first Half-Life game, in the sense that none of its elements were new, but everything had been stripped down and polished and redesigned and assembled with fresh ideas and modern materials.

Top late design genius Yoshihisa Maitani managed to squeeze a professional-level SLR into a body that was lighter and about half a centimetre smaller in all dimensions than competing designs, without compromising its functionality. This extended to the rest of the expansive OM system; the motor drives, flash units and particularly the lenses were all very compact. The OM-1 and its heirs sold well, and within a short time compact was in - the Pentax ME and Nikon EM followed a couple of years later. On a broader level the 1970s saw the SLR become a popular consumer gadget, and if the 1960s was the golden age of the posh SLR then the 1970s was the heyday of the SLR-as-Package Holiday-Accompaniment, with half of them bought by dads who imagined that one day they might be top fashion photographers.

The old Foyles has now become a tat bazaar / sushi bar / laser tag arena (!) called O YES, which is both a clever reuse of the original sign and utterly naff. On the positive side, the new Foyles (just up the road) is fantastic, but it's now surrounded by boarded-up shops, and what future is there for a big prestige physical bookshop on Charing Cross road? Since when did it make sense to put a bookshop in the middle of London? The city's residents are split between people who don't read books and people who don't go to shops or read books.

I was originally exposed to the OM system via its lenses, which are tiny and can be adapted to work with modern digital cameras; I picked up an OM-2 and liked it, but I was always curious about the OM-1. The OM-2 has aperture-priority autoexposure and requires batteries to work, whereas the OM-1 is mechanical and only requires batteries for the built-in light meter, which drives an indicator needle in the viewfinder. The needle is perhaps the camera's only flaw; it's a bit too small to see easily in dim light, and this being 1972 it's not illuminated. Having said that the viewfinder is enormous and (again, this is 1972) unencumbered by readouts of any kind. It doesn't matter what you wear, just so long as you are there.

The OM-1 was sold from 1972 right up until the mid-late 1980s, although there were different models, each one more advanced than the last. The first OM-1 was actually the Olympus M-1, but after a complaint from Leica Olympus changed the name. There is some debate as to how many M-1s were sold, with estimates extended into the tens of thousands based on the serial numbers of surviving units. This fan site has lots of images of lens boxes and the like, which reveal that the M-1 was part of the M-System. It must have been a bother having to redesign everything. The system's logotype was originally a slanted-forward M. The OM system dropped the slant, perhaps because the letter O looks odd when it's slanted. OOOOOOOOOOOO, see what I mean?

The M-1 brochure has an addendum pointing out that the system's name will be changed for trademark reasons, so the change must have been unexpected and sudden. The brochure also lists an impressive range of lenses:

On the whole the OM lens range didn't expand all that much over its production run; it seemed to stagnate in the 1980s. The original OM-1 was replaced in 1974 by a new OM-1, unofficially known as the OM-1MD although never badged as such, which could accept motor drives. The MD was replaced in 1978 by the OM-1n, which added a flash ready light in the viewfinder (mine is very faint, but still works) and a modified wind lever.

As far as I can tell there's no reason other than nostalgia to buy one of the pre-1n models. The 1n was discontinued in the mid-late 1980s. Most sources say 1987, but my hunch is that Olympus gave up on it in the middle of the decade in favour of the OM-4, and sales beyond 1985 or so were just a trickle from Olympus' stockpile. Judging by Google Books' archive of old magazines, the price had fallen to budget level by 1985. I was only a kid at the time, but I imagine that the OM-1 would have felt a bit naff in the late 1980s.

The OM-1 was very fresh and new in the 1970s; Olympus' adverts big it up as a state-of-the-art SLR embodying the latest technology in electronics, metallurgy and optics. It lived long enough to become a modern classic, and ironically Olympus' print adverts of the 1980s tout its conservatism:

It's a camera, not a computer made of metal, not plastic. Olympus struggled with its SLR range in the 1980s. The OM-3 was an improved OM-1n that nonetheless felt superfluous and was discontinued quickly, before being revived with an expensive titanium body in the 1990s; the OM-4 was an improved OM-2 with a clever multi-spot metering system that must have been difficult for camera shop employees to sell. The company's attempts to sell a plastic, autofocus SLR were half-hearted, and eventually Olympus concentrated on the compact market instead. It's often said in marketing circles that you should sell benefits, not features, and Olympus seems to have a problem with this; the Four-Thirds system was sold as the first-ever native digital SLR system that was a marvel of modern technology, but the cameras were initially no smaller than the competition and did nothing better.

My OM-1n must be around thirty years old, and has a patina, but the shutter still fires with a reassuringly dampened cuh-chunk sound. The adverts also tout the camera's ruggedness, although as far as I can tell Olympus never seriously attempted to take on Nikon for the professional photojournalist market. There were a couple of fast telephotos - including a 250mm f/2.0 which still sounds impressive nowadays - but otherwise the company seemed to be content with the macro / scientific market. Olympus also sells medical equipment, and there was an extensive range of OM macro bellows and lenses.

For the images in this post I used a Vivitar 28-85mm f/2.8-3.8, which is bigger than the camera and large enough to act as its own carrying handle.

It's the year of the sheep. We're going to be sick of "you're all sheeple" by the end of the year. Yeah, and what if the sheeple DO rise, and we don't like it?

I mean, the Daily Mail is the best-selling newspaper and most popular news website in the UK. *They* outnumber *you*, isn't it likely that a popular revolution would sweep *them* into power?
That's why democracy doesn't work, and that's why you don't have it.

And also why you can't be trusted with scissors. Physically the lens is awkward. It's one of Vivitar's auto variable focusing designs, built by Kiron in Japan. You grab the barrel and pull back to zoom out, push forward to zoom in, twist to focus, and as you focus it zooms a little bit, and as you zoom the focus changes, and ultimately it's a bit like flying a helicopter or playing the bagpipes, you have to use all of your limbs plus your mouth.

As far as I know it's a late 1970s / early 1980s design, unusually fast and wide for the period. It focuses very closely at 28mm and throughout the range until 85mm, at which point the minimum focus distance abruptly goes up a few feet; there's noticeable barrel distortion at the wider end and some obvious vignetting, but otherwise I don't have a problem with it. I use it as a 28mm that zooms in a bit.

On the negative side, it turns the compact OM-1 into a large, heavy lump. On the positive side, Olympus never made a lens with the same specification - the company concentrated on primes instead - but on the negative side again I could probably have got by with a 28mm f/2.8 and some footwork and a piano and some drugs.

It's London Fashion Week. There it is, right there. Somerset House had a crowd of youths with cameras near the entrance. My hunch is that when an attractive lady comes along, they jump out and say that they're the official photographer; their goal is to get her number and put her into an environment where it's easier and less painful to just get naked than resist.

Eventually you come to despise the poor and the weak. They can't be bothered to help themselves, let them perish.

Film-wise I used HP5 and TMAX 400. Which is which? Cast your eyes over the images in this post; the grey images are HP5, the black images are TMAX. The meter was accurate enough for them. The OM uses long-discontinued PX mercury cells, but luckily I have an adapter that lets me use modern batteries. The meter needle goes snick-snick-snick instead of waving about.

Did I like the OM-1? I think I was spoiled by the OM-2, which is physically almost identical but has autoexposure. The OM-1's only real advantage is that it will work without electricity, but in 2014 the chances of me being without electricity are very small.

The OM-1 also has a mirror lock up, but again in 2014 the chances of me using the camera for astronomy or macro photography are very small. The problem is that if I have to grab a 35mm film SLR, why not the OM-2?

The OM-1 has essentially just one usability quirk. The shutter speed dial goes around the lens mount, shown here on an OM-2:

Nikon used this idea in the Nikkormat FT of 1965, but gave up on it thereafter. The OM-1's implementation is much better - the OM system puts the aperture ring at the end of the lens, away from the body - but it's a shame the two finger-grabs aren't larger. If they were a little bit bigger and projected further forwards the camera would be easier to use; in practice I left it at 1/125 and changed the aperture instead.

Electronics-wise the OM-2 supports automatic flash whereas the OM-1 doesn't, but again I doubt I'll ever use the OM's flash system except to test that it works. The OM-1 seems to have had no design faults or reliability issues (later OMs had electrical gremlins).

It's good that Facebook has billboard advertisements. I might never have heard of them otherwise. Also, friends are useful. Are we on the verge of something? And if so, what?

Pentax SP500

The Pentax Spotmatic is one of the most fondly-remembered SLRs of the 1960s. It was cheaper than a Nikon, smaller, and it had a built-in through-the-lens lightmeter, which was unusual at the time. The original Spotmatic was only on sale for a few years, and in practice when people nowadays talk about the Pentax Spotmatic they're probably referring to all of the various models that Pentax sold during the 1960s and early 1970s. They were physically and technically very similar. For example, the internet tells us that The Beatles owned Pentax Spotmatics, but on closer inspection it looks as if they have pre-Spotmatic Pentax S1s or SVs (the rewind knob and metal around the lens mount give it away). Ringo Starr has such kissable lips, doesn't he?
 
I say Pentax - the camera was, strictly speaking, an Asahi Pentax Spotmatic, because in those days Asahi was the company, and Pentax was the brand name, and Spotmatic was a kind of subtitle, because the camera had a light meter, and matic. Got that? The lightmeter was centre-weighted, and there was nothing automatic about the camera - you had to meter and set the controls by hand - and so it should have been called the Asahi Pentax Centremanual, but obviously the men at Asahi decided that poetry was more important than technical accuracy. Don't worry, the rest of the post is easier to read. Writing a blog post is very much like making love - it starts off with a flurry of technical details, and then you get into a groove, and at the end you think "is that it?", and you wonder if it was worth the expense. And then you spend a few minutes looking at old issues of Record Mirror with Johnny Rotten on the cover.

Still, in the US it was often called the Honeywell Pentax Spotmatic because it was imported by a company called Honeywell, a giant conglomerate that made or makes fridges, thermostats and cluster bombs, including the awesome Vietnam-era MK-20 Rockeye and the CBU-87 Combined Effect Munition, one of the stars of the first Gulf War.

Pentax followed the Spotmatic with a pair of budget models, the SP1000 and the SP500, which lopped off the self-timer but were otherwise much the same. The SP1000 had a top shutter speed of 1/1000, just like the original Spotmatic. The SP500 had a top speed of 1/500 but - as every article about the camera is obliged to point out - this was achieved by rubbing the 1/1000 mark from the shutter speed dial. You could still select 1/1000, although it wasn't tested by the factory to be accurate at that speed:

Pentax had pulled the same trick before, with the S1a. It comes across as simultaneously shrewd and a bit unfair; it's odd that the company didn't put a hotshoe or a film memo holder (for example) on the Spotmatic, and simply leave it off the SP1000 as a cost-saving measure. Still, I'm not an engineer.

Here's what the camera looks like. I have no emotional connection with Pentax and so I bought the cheapest working model I could find, which was £9:

That didn't include the lens, of course, although after using it for a few years it ain't pretty no more (a screw was loose, and so I had to take off the front bezel, which scratched it to botheration). The 50mm f/1.4 Super Takumar is lovely to use, look through, and hold, with pleasant bokeh and a good chunky focus ring. It's an M42 lens, which means that it has a 42mm screw mount. The M42 mount was shared by contemporary Prakticas, Zenits, OEM Cosinas, and even the very first full-frame Olympus SLR, the FTL.

Record Mirror, 11 December 1976: "like hit men they have come out of the night to shoot the legs off a tired music industry that has relied on crutches far too long". Barry Cain, I ask you - what's the point of shooting the legs off a person who already uses crutches? The metaphor doesn't make sense.

Seriously, "dah dah dah has come to pour petrol on the crutches of a tired music industry" or something along those lines would have made a lot more sense. Hitmen kill people with petrol; crutches are made of wood, it works. If only I could go back in time to 1976 and become editor of Record Mirror, I might have done some good. If only.

M42 lenses are cheaply available on eBay, although beyond the Takumars there weren't very many stand-outs, and the range is generally limited to 28mm at the wide end and 200mm at the long end. And they're mostly half a century old by now. Nonetheless the Russian 16mm Zenitar fisheye is available in M42, and there were several long M42 mirror lenses. Very few zooms. M42 was briefly revived in 2003 with the one-off, limited-edition Voigtlander Bessaflex TM, which came with what must be the last new-production M42 lens ever, a Topcor 58mm f/1.4. This was discontinued in the mid-2000s although a rebranded version for other lens mounts is still sold as the Voigtlander 58mm f/1.4 Nokton.

The Takumar has a 49mm filter thread, and because I have some old filters lying around I decided to have a go with a Hoya Star-Six. This has lines engraved in the glass that make point light sources look like the opening credits of John Nathan-Turner's early-80s Dr Who opening sequence. With Peter Howell's reworking of the classic Dr Who theme, performed with a mixture of Yamaha CS-80 and vocoder. Fifteen years later, when the kids were old enough to afford musical instruments of their own, they formed Orbital and The Future Sound of London.

Er, yes, star filter:

The effect is naff if you overuse it, so that's enough of that.

Not many shops sell film in London in 2013, but there's one on Tottenham Court Road that does (for £7.99 a pop, mind). I used a mixture of some long-expired Fuji 400 that I bought ages ago, some new Kodak Ektar, and some new Kodak ColorPlus 200, the absolute cheapest 35mm film you can buy new in the UK today (at £2.39 a roll with eBay prices, in a pack of five). Here are some shots taken with this film, on an overcast day, with the colours balanced for daylight - they looked a bit green straight from the scanner - and the contrast turned up:

BOWIE IS LONDON, do you see? Also, his eyes are records.

But, the camera. What's it like? Not bad. The major innovation at the time was the light meter, which on my example was naff. Even after using the correct and tricky to source battery it seemed to be a stop under in bright daylight but roughly correct in dimmer light, so I used a handheld meter instead. Ergonomically the design must have had some thought put into it - the speed dial is right up against the shutter button, so it's a cinch to change speeds whilst holding the camera up to your face.

On the other hand I wasn't enamoured of the meter control. I can see how it's supposed to work. You hold the camera in your left hand and use your thumb to trip the meter, with your fingers changing the aperture. But I never became comfortable with it. In my opinion the unlovely, unloved Praktica LTL of the early 1970s got this right, by putting the lightmeter control right next to the shutter button (which was, unusually, mounted on the front of the camera).

Objectively, of the film cameras I've had a look at this year, I still prefer the Olympus OM-2. It's smaller than the SP500 and it has automatic exposure, which is the kind of thing that macho hardcore photo purists despise but, dammit, it works and it saves messing about. Yes, I said messing, I apologise. Of course it's not a fair comparison. The SP500 was an evolutionary update of a design that had its roots in the 1950s, the OM-2 was state-of-the-art for the mid-70s. A more fair comparison would be a Pentax ME.

Whilst I wandered around Soho and the area around Charing Cross and latterly Kensington, did any young ladies accost me and demand that I take their portrait? No, and so in that respect the SP500 failed. Perhaps it's not the camera. Still, my search continues.