the Olympus OM-1 - the XA Series
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| The path to a compact SLR would require the efficient use of underutilized space. | ||||||
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One problem was the development of an alternative finder, and another was durability. The question was how many times the camera could be used. An expensive camera was good for 10,000 shots, but I wanted to increase that to 100,000. Naturally, the designers who were given this task were daunted. However, we had to do it somehow, because management had finally approved the concept after a year of deliberations.
Around this time the Japanese government was talking about relocating Japan's capital functions away from Tokyo. This gave me the idea of relocating some of the core functions in the camera. But where could we put them? The area beneath the mirror was furthest away from the core functions, but it would be extremely difficult to move the functions there. It would have been simple with today's electronic technology, but everything was mechanical back then, and all the mechanisms had to be connected. My first idea was to find underutilized areas in the camera and relocate some of the functions to those areas. However, those spaces were underutilized for a reason! We couldn't connect the functions. We found that by using a central drive shaft running from the top of the camera to the bottom we could transmit the driving force, even in those underutilized spaces. However, some functions, such as shutter speed adjustment, couldn't be moved. To relocate the shutter speed control, we would have had to put the dial on the bottom of the camera, which would have created many problems: the photographer would have had to turn the camera upside down to adjust the speed, and the dial would have been inaccessible when the camera was on a tripod. However, there was space, and we had reached a decision that functions should be relocated to that space. It was not difficult to move the strength controls. The problem was the linkage between the shutter speed and other controls. The method that we devised to move things from the bottom of the camera to the top was to place the shutter dial on the front of the camera. That was the only solution, and so that is what we did. Only the OM had a shutter speed dial in that location.
When I proposed this design, someone who knew cameras well told me that there were two types of SLR: the lens shutter type and focal plane type, and that the focal plane type was seen as a high-end camera and the lens shutter type as a rather cheap version. In a lens shutter camera, the shutter is in front, and of course the aperture and shutter are positioned around the lens. He said that our camera would be mistaken for a cheap lens shutter type and would not sell. It's difficult to break through the barrier of accepted wisdom. However, we were able to make so much progress with the design because originally there was nothing in the underutilized space in the camera. In the upper part of the camera there was a battle for spaces measured in tenths of a millimeter. In the lower part there was nothing, which meant that while the camera itself would be smaller, its parts could be bigger and stronger. So the concept of using underutilized spaces was our first step on the road to developing a compact SLR. |
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