Amarcord: Olympus PEN-W

[shoplink 37230 ebay]

[/shoplink] It’s quite amazing how many compact camera Olympus did in the past. We are discovering some of their nicest products in our Amarcord column. Til now we saw the (Click on the name to read the article) Olympus 35 RD, Olympus Trip 35, Olympus PEN EED, Olympus 35 SP and the PEN F.

Recently Olympus launched the new body cap lens that has a constant f/8.0 aperture. Many of you argued that f/8.0 is a huge limit and a faster body cap lens should be done by Oly. And actually….Olympus already did such a compact and fast lens in the past! The [shoplink 37230 ebay]Olympus PEN-W (ebay auctions here)[/shoplink] used an extremely compact and fixed 25mm f/2.8 lens (see picture on top). This Pen Series camera was designed specifically for wide-angle photography (Source Olympus). To see how compact this lens is you can also watch that youtube video. Ok, so it’s possible…but how good is a lens like that? Lars-Göran Hedström posted a full review of the PEN-W on his blog Sculptingwithlight (Click here). Greta pics!

Now let’s see if Olympus can do a lens like that for the MFT system too!

Olympus PEN-W auctions on [shoplink 37230 ebay]eBay (Click here)[/shoplink].
There is a commerative Gold finished PEN-W on [shoplink 37231 ebay]eBay US (Click here)[/shoplink].