Catalogue information
During the period that Yoshihisa Maitani designed the famous Olympus PEN and Olympus Trip cameras for Olympus Kogaku Ltd, he was amazed that the compactness of cameras was seen so little as an added value at the competition. Large and heavy was synonymous with solidity in camera land at the time. Despite this dogma, Olympus approved the M (aitani) -1 project and the foundation was laid to develop a system camera that is as compact and light as possible with a high degree of ease of use and without making any concessions in quality. It took Maitani 5 years to design and develop the Olympus OM System, consisting of dozens of lenses, motor drives and flash units. His prototype of the first Olympus OM-SLR system camera was shown to the press at the 1972 Photokina as a full-fledged system camera for the professional photographer, called Olympus M-1. However, the company Leitz (Leica) immediately filed a protest against this naming and claimed naming rights because they had already released a Leica M1. Olympus then decided to change its name to OM-1. But because many photo dealers (worldwide) were already equipped with some M-1 cameras a few weeks before the opening of the Photokina, they could not be prevented from being sold. For that reason, the Olympus M-1 cameras are rare to find and have become real collector's items! Not only for the aforementioned reason, the Olympus OM-1 caused a sensation at the Photokina, but also because compared to the competitors' SLR cameras it was astonishingly small and light in weight and also had a very comfortable viewfinder with possibility to change (optional) focusing screens. (The OM-1's standard focusing screen has also long been known as one of the brightest).
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