Olympus History

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  • the Semi-Olympus I - the Pen Series
  • the Olympus OM-1 - the XA Series

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A caseless, capless camera would be small enough to fit in a breast pocket.

While the OM was small, it was an SLR, and there was a limit to how far we could reduce the size. We needed to create an even smaller camera. As I mentioned earlier, however, we faced resistance from Kodak when we developed the half-size Pen. The use of 35mm film was an absolute requirement in those days, and I was determined to create a smaller camera within that constraint. If you take a 35mm screen and add a cassette to hold the film on both sides, you can reduce the width to a minimum of 105 millimeters. However, you can't reduce the height to less than 60-65 millimeters because of the finder. When it comes to thickness, the lens is the problem. There were folding cameras with collapsible lens, and I thought that this might be the answer, but I didn't want to move the lens much because there were so many interactions with the shutter and the mechanisms. So I decided to use a short lens that would be fixed in place. I began by setting the dimensions for my small camera, which I thought should be about 100-105 millimeters wide, 60-65 millimeters high and 30 millimeters thick, though I was prepared to allow a little leeway in these dimensions. Once I had reached that stage, the task of making such a camera became a major challenge. A camera was a treasured possession, and people kept them in cases. It was expensive to make cases. We first used a soft case for the Pen. It was extremely popular, and Sony asked if it could use the Olympus soft case for its portable radios. However, something designed to be carried everywhere had to fit in a pocket, the smallest of which is the breast pocket of a shirt. My idea was to make a camera small enough to fit in that pocket. I wanted to make it as small as today's mobile telephones. And that idea led me to get rid of the case. It would be a caseless camera. If I may skip forward a little, despite my youth I was invited to be the guest of honor at the wedding ceremony of the son of a camera case manufacturer, whose business was located in Tokyo's Koto Ward. The wedding was held two days after we had announced the caseless camera. There were about 650 guests, including many members of the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly. When it was my turn to speak, I told them that we had launched a caseless camera two days before, and I explained with great regret that we would no longer be using cases. Another problem was the lens cap. The cap protects the lens from scratching and fingerprints, but it's a troublesome component. People lose them. The new camera had to be caseless, capless and small enough to fit in a shirt breast pocket. These were the conditions for my concept of a camera that could be carried everywhere. Our determination to meet these conditions led to the XA. It certainly didn't need a case, and in that sense it was an extremely unusual camera.

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