Olympus 35 IVa (1953)

Name: Olympus 35 IVa
Brand: Olympus

The Olympus 35 IVa is a compact 35mm film camera from the early 1950s. One source pins it specifically to 1953. It's purely mechanical and zone/scale focusing, with no built-in meter. You set focus by estimate and exposure by hand. The lens is a Zuiko 40mm f3.5, and the Copal shutter runs from bulb up to 1/200 sec. That's the whole hard spec sheet. No dimensions, weight, viewfinder details, or aperture range beyond the maximum f3.5 are documented in the sources.

It was priced at ¥15,000 when new. One Flickr user reports finding a working example at an antique mall for $25. A used dealer in Japan lists one at 5,000 (currency unclear), and at least one rental shop carries it, noted simply as "Rent Only."

One design note survives. Olympus did research into film flatness for this camera, including platen improvements, to get satisfactory results given the shallow depth of focus of the 35mm format. Otherwise it was a straightforward, no-frills compact.

Beyond that, the record is thin. There are no production run details, no common failure points, no market analysis. It appears to have been one step in Olympus's long-running 35 series, the company's first line of 35mm cameras, which evolved from the 1940s through 1981. Its specific place in that lineup relative to siblings like the 35 SP isn't documented in the sources.