When Japanese digital camera designer Yoshihisa Maitani was nonetheless a pupil, he designed and patented his first digital camera. Olympus was searching for expertise and, when its head designer got here throughout the patent in 1956, he insisted the younger Maitani work for them.
Years later, Maitani advised his model of the story. “In these days, a pupil who refused to work for the primary firm to supply him a place was considered a shame to his college. I had acquired a job supply from an vehicle producer, however I pretended that I hadn’t and went to work for Olympus, as an alternative.”
Upon beginning at Olympus, he was despatched to the manufacturing unit for sensible coaching, the place he was rotated by way of completely different departments each six months. After two years of this front-line coaching, he returned to the design division and was given a deceptively easy job: strive designing one thing.
Believing that the lens is the soul of the digital camera, he requested his lens designers to make a lens nearly as good the lens on his Leica IIIF with none concern for price. They did, but it surely consumed his whole price range!
Ultimately he got here up with a design each he and his managers thought would promote and, in 1959, the Olympus PEN was born.
The PEN was Olympus’ first and best-known half-frame digital camera and have become an enormous market success. Gifted with a wonderful lens, sturdy building and low price, over 17 million PEN sequence cameras had been produced through the Sixties and Seventies.
In 1963, Maitani and his workforce produced the world’s first half-frame SLR, the PEN F. Fantastically made, with a rotary shutter and a porro-mirror finder, it’s completely tiny, with lenses to match.
However, not like the PEN sequence of point-and-shoot cameras, SLR customers demand extra. And though the digital camera was fantastic and the lenses very good, it proved very troublesome to get a good 11×14-inch print from the very small damaging. Your scribe bought a PEN F however bought it quickly after for that very motive.
Over a 40-year profession, Maitani and his groups went on to supply the legendary Journey 35, the Olympus XA and Stylus sequence of rangefinder cameras, together with the OM sequence of 35mm SLRs.
His legacy was detailed in a handwritten doc that he wrote to himself. In his pocket book, Maitani set out a philosophy of compactness, gentle weight and “final reliability” for Olympus cameras. It’s a route that each Olympus and its successor, OM System, have adopted ever since.
Discover out extra about pictures’s previous in David Younger’s e book, A Temporary Historical past of Pictures.
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Check out the finest movie cameras you should purchase at this time – or learn different articles in David Younger’s Traditional Cameras sequence. You must also try our critiques of the PEN’s descendents, the Olympus PEN F and Olympus PEN E-P7, and see the finest Olympus and OM System cameras accessible at this time.