A Trail-Blazer from Olympus

[Dan Deary]

Just acquired an earlier version of this model labled Olympus EE although the case is labled "Auto Eye." There is one significant difference in that the lens barrel has a shutter speed ring with speeds offered from 1 sec to 500 sec and B. My example has a dead selenium meter so the auto function does not work, leaving only manual settings. On mine it does involve readjusting the film speed ring when I want to use slow speeds, a bit inconvenient but overall all manual speeds work except B. Another difference is that the lens is labled 1: 2.3 instead of the later version Rick has. Of couse mine also has a grey covering.

 

 

 

 

[Dan Deary]

I looked at Rick's picture again and it does show shutter speeds on the barrel of his later version. My bad. I may have seen a more recent version on another posting somewhere in which there were no shutter speeds shown.

[rick_drawbridge]

It appears to be a nice tidy example, Dan. I hope you can post some of your results on the Forum.

[Dan Deary]

In doing more research on the interweb I would surmise that there are multiple versions of this camera, at least three, probably more. Another difference I noticed late was that in my version I have a single viewfinder window with rangefinder. Ricks version looks like it has second rangefinder window. I am convinced I have one of the very earliest versions. It looks like the Olympus engineers were constantly tweaking this camera in its brief run from 1960-1963.