Olympus History

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We decide to create a camera better than Leica, one that easily takes close-ups of flowers or pictures of documents.

The Leica that I was using before I joined Olympus was truly an excellent camera - it was almost perfect for snapshot photography. But there was a problem. These days when we want to copy documents we simply go to a convenience store, but back then the only way to make copies was to photograph documents. I needed to copy some material for my graduation thesis, and because I saw myself as an expert with the Leica, I tried using it to photograph the papers. It didn't work, because I didn't have an accessory that allowed me to take photographs at a distance of 30 to 40 centimeters. So I borrowed an early Pentax SLR camera and used that to photograph my documents. There was nothing the Leica couldn't do, be it close-ups of flowers or copies of documents. But these tasks were extremely difficult. With an SLR it was simple. I thought that if I was going to get involved in development, this was the field for me. However, Pentax SLRs were big and heavy, substantially bigger and heavier than the Leica. The designers had worked hard to reduce the size, but still they were bigger than the Leica. For someone like me who always carries a camera around, this was a real nuisance.

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