the Semi-Olympus I - the Pen Series
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| Developing the Pen F - the only half-size SLR camera | ||||||
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| With the Pen selling so well, I no longer faced the barrier of accepted wisdom in my work. Instead I was told to make new cameras more quickly. However, the technology barrier was still there. I couldn't handle the design work alone any more, and for the first time I was given an assistant. My assistant was the leading theoretician in the development department, and he said that he wanted to begin by making a rotary shutter. What he created had all the basic characteristics of a rotary shutter, which consists of a rotating disk. It looked great, and I decided to leave the project to my junior colleague. Unfortunately it did not go as planned: each rotation took about one-fiftieth of a second. We tried in vain to make it go faster, for an SLR camera with a top shutter speed of one-sixtieth of a second was unthinkable. We concluded that the only way to increase the speed of the shutter was to reduce the weight. Apertures and shutters are made of thin steel sheet. The steel is about six hundredths of a millimeter thick, which makes it too heavy to rotate any faster, so we tried using aluminum, which is lighter than steel. We found that the connection between the shaft and the vanes was not durable enough, so we increased the number of fasteners. Once we had securely fastened the vanes at one end, they started to break at the other end. The shutter would rotate, but the sudden force applied when it stopped caused a massive shock. The aluminum sheet crumpled like a fan. This was hopeless, so we decided to look for other light materials. The next substance that we tried was titanium, which was being used by NASA. Titanium was very rare at that time, and the purchasing department desperately searched for a source. Eventually they found a supplier somewhere in Yokosuka. We only needed a minute quantity for our prototype, but the supplier refused to sell the titanium piecemeal, and so we were forced to buy an entire roll. It was extremely expensive, but fortunately we were able to use it later, otherwise we would have incurred a huge loss. By using titanium, we were able to increase the speed to one three-hundredth of a second. But it still wasn't fast enough, so we made the titanium even thinner, but it crumpled like a fan. Then we remembered a technology used in microscope manufacturing, whereby the glass is etched away in the center leaving it thick at the circumference. When we etched the titanium in the same way, we were able to increase the speed almost to one five-hundredth of a second. But even this was not fast enough. The only solution now was to strengthen the spring. That enabled us to achieve a speed of one five-hundredth of a second initially, but the spring would break after a few repetitions. When we examined the affected parts under a microscope, we saw that even though the spring was made of ordinary steel, it looked like a rough piece of rope that had been pulled apart. It was metal fatigue.
And that is how we developed the Pen F. We had created the world's first and only SLR camera. Unfortunately it was a huge failure. Because we took all the patents, no other company could manufacture this type of camera, and there was no boom. This completes the first half of my presentation. I thought that I was challenging the two barriers with my own vision, but in fact I was simply working within the Olympus color. Text prepared by the Olympus Web Strategy Group |
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