Olympus XA1 – One roll mini-review

I have enjoyed owning and using various Olympus XA cameras for a while, but I had skipped over the XA1 with its fixed focus and protruding shutter button. I wondered why would they make such a thing after the aperture-priority rangefinder XA with its distinctive red shutter release pad? But, having read some favourable posts and comments about this camera on 35mmc, I had an idea in mind to give it a try sometime.

I bought mine for not a lot of money on Ebay, as it was being sold as untested. It looked good in the photos, so I put in an offer which was accepted. A few days later, I had my eager mitts on it. It looked as good as the photos and indeed showed very little evidence of use.

The camera is very light, to the extent that when I first picked it up, I was worried that it was just an empty shell with no photographic gubbins inside. My XA4 feels a lot heavier.

The lens is 35mm, with an F/4 maximum aperture. The focus is fixed at an unspecified distance which allows everything from 1.5 metres to infinity to be acceptably sharp, so says the manual, but what it doesn’t say is that this will vary with the selected aperture.

In operation, the Olympus XA1 is reminiscent of the Olympus Trip 35. The shutter button has a similar feel, though plastic rather than metal. If there’s not enough light it pops up a red flag and doesn’t allow the shutter to fire. Unlike the Trip, there are no focus zones to select.

I used ProImage 100 for my test. The camera only has settings for ISO100 and ISO400, so it limits the choice of films to use. I wondered whether those shots in lower light levels, necessitating large apertures, would actually produce pictures with front-to-back sharpness.

I like ProImage 100 as the colours are natural, with a bit more saturation than Gold, and medium contrast, allowing it to be useful for many different types of scene.

All my test photos were sharp front-to-back with a character not unlike other Olympus XA series cameras. I enjoyed using it but I felt a bit like I was cheating, as it was too easy!

I’m not sure who the target market would have been for the Olympus XA1. It has a high quality lens that would appeal to keen photographers, but the stripped down functionality is more suited to casual snappers. I wonder how well it sold when it was first introduced.

Here are ten of my favourite photos from the roll.

This is a fun camera to use, but compared to a camera with some manual controls, the strictly point-and-shoot operation feels a little uninvolving, which I hadn’t expected. Impulsively, I have now flogged it for a modest profit. Perhaps I should have kept it for occasional use but I had reached a point where I felt like I had too many cameras and I have a hard time dealing with too much choice.

I have some more pictures, mostly taken on other cameras, on flickr here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/125881098@N03/

Share this post: