Glass Bodies a variant-level encyclopedia of vintage lenses and cameras by iwillpat

Olympus XA

Olympus · Fixed lens · 24×36mm on 35mm film, hinged back released by lifting the rewind knob · 1979

Also known as: Olympus XA rangefinder · オリンパスXA · Olympus XA + A11

Variants & identification

Variant Mount Years Serial ranges Production
Olympus XA 35mm compact 1979–1985 — No figure has ever been published
  1. There is no production figure for the XA. Olympus's corporate chronology records the launch and nothing else; none of the substantial reviews carries a number; no serial table exists to derive one from. The one figure in circulation — 20,000 to 30,000 cameras a month, which would imply roughly two million over the run — comes from an unsourced forum post and should be treated as folklore. This page would rather print nothing.
  2. The lens is the reason the camera exists. Maitani's team began from a Tessar and rejected it as too deep, then adopted what Olympus called a reverse retrofocus — a telephoto-type configuration that pulls the rear principal plane forward — and focused it internally by moving the third group, so nothing protrudes and nothing collapses. Modern Photography's optical description adds that high-refractive-index glasses were needed to control aberration across the field, with a high-index crown rear element and a special flint second element, and that the elements had to be aligned to very close tolerances.
  3. Modern Photography's bench figures, November 1979, in line pairs per millimetre, centre then edge: f/2.8 acceptable 42 / good 30; f/4 good 47 / good 32; f/5.6 very good 59 / very good 42; f/8 excellent 67 / excellent 47; f/11 excellent 67 / excellent 53; f/16 excellent 59 / excellent 47; f/22 good 47 / very good 37. On axis at full aperture the bench showed yellow flare and very slight overcorrected spherical aberration, nearly gone by f/4.
  4. The A11 flash is part of the design rather than an accessory bolted on: it adds less than an inch and a half to the camera's length and nothing at all to its height or depth, runs on one AA cell for a claimed 120 flashes, and switches off by pressing its pop-up readylight back down. Its limitation is the autoflash film-speed settings, which offer ASA 100 and ASA 400 and nothing between — awkward in 1979, when Kodachrome 64 and Ektachrome 64 were the popular American slide films.
  5. Olympus's own museum lecture states that the XA became the first camera to win a Good Design Grand Prize from the Japan Industrial Design Promotion Organization, without naming a model number or a year. The XA2 entry records the competing attribution.
  6. Modern Photography set the camera in its category by name in 1979: the pocketable full-frame 35mm begins with the Rollei 35, the Minox 35 EL arrives in 1976, then the Ricoh FF-1 and the Vivitar 35EM, and the XA sits between the Minox and the Ricoh in size while carrying a rangefinder none of them has.
  7. The XA is routinely called the smallest coupled-rangefinder 35mm camera ever made. That is one camera too strong. English Wikipedia's own wording is that it "was one of the smallest rangefinder cameras ever made, together with the Contax T", and the published dimensions bear the qualification out: the XA is 102 × 64.5 × 40 mm, the Contax T of 1984 is 98 × 66.5 × 32.5 mm with its lens retracted — smaller in two axes of three, and smaller again by volume. The XA is the lighter of the pair at 225 g against 270 g, and it is five years earlier. Neither fact makes it the smallest, and no source consulted here says it is.
How to tell them apart (expand)
  • The barrier is the camera: sliding it open uncovers the lens and the finder, unblinds the rangefinder window and unlocks the shutter, and Olympus called it a dust barrier rather than a cover
  • The lens does not move and does not collapse — the body is 40 mm thick with a fixed 35mm lens in it, which is the whole engineering claim
  • A flat electromagnetic shutter release with less than a quarter of a millimetre of travel, and no mechanical linkage behind it
  • A ridged lever on the base selecting backlight compensation, battery check and self-timer; in the self-timer position it folds out about 3/8 in. and props the camera up on a sloping surface
  • A speaker on the top plate that beeps for the self-timer and whines for the battery check
  • No lens cap and no ever-ready case were made, because with the barrier closed the camera needs neither

Olympus XA:

  • The only XA with an aperture lever: a vertical scale to the right of the lens, f/2.8 to f/22
  • The only XA with a rangefinder — a yellowish square patch in the centre of the finder
  • A flattened-oval barrier dome; the XA3 and XA4 domes are rounder and their bodies slightly larger
  • Focusing tab below the lens with the distance read through a cutout visible from the top of the camera; US-market cameras are marked in feet only
  • 102 × 64.5 × 40 mm, 225 g

Serial-range notes

single block, no published decoder
Serial numbers run in one sequence across the production life and no source consulted here maps any part of it to a date, a factory or a running change. Modern Photography's test camera was body no. 125475 in late 1979, which is the only number in this entry that can be tied to a date at all.

Specifications

Format
24×36mm on 35mm film, hinged back released by lifting the rewind knob
Finder
Combined rangefinder and viewfinder with an Albada bright frame and vertical parallax marks; the rangefinder image is a square yellowish patch at the centre, and a vertical needle at the left edge reads out the shutter speed the camera has chosen · 0.6× magnification · manual — marks in the frame, corrected by the photographer parallax correction
Shutter
Electronically controlled two-blade metal between-lens leaf, timed by a magnet on the camera base · 10s – 1/500 automatic; the finder scale reads 1s – 1/500 with a hatched over-exposure warning above it · flash sync X; the aperture lever pushed above f/2.8 to the blue flash marks sets 1/30 at f/4 · self-timer
Film advance
Thumbwheel on the back, worked by the right thumb; a single sprocket wheel at the lower right of the gate
Back
Hinged, opening to the right; released by closing the barrier and lifting the rewind knob
Meter
Two CdS cells behind the cylindrical window above the lens. One sets the exposure directly; the second sits behind a graduated series of fixed openings and drives the finder's shutter-speed needle. Aperture priority, ASA 25–800, +1.5 EV backlight compensation on the base lever, powered by two 1.5 V silver-oxide cells (SR44 / EPX76 / MX76). The ASA control moves the cell behind an aperture plate; the aperture control moves the plate in front of it
Designed by
Maitani Yoshihisa (米谷美久) — the camera — set the 4 cm thickness target with clay models and refused to give it up when the lens division said a 35mm focal length would not fit · Hayamizu Yoshisada — head of the lens division, who had designed the Tessar-type D.Zuiko on the original Pen; told Maitani a 31mm lens would be needed, then led the team that made 35mm fit · Sato Yuichi — co-inventor with Maitani on US patent 4,273,434, 'Photographic camera', filed 20 July 1979
Weight
225 g
Dimensions
102 × 64.5 × 40 mm
Country
Japan
Original price
US$233 with the A11 flash unit, as quoted in Modern Photography's test report of November 1979. No body-only list price has been located. (today $1,010)
Accessories
A11 electronic flash — guide number 10, one AA cell, the pairing most XAs were sold in · A16 electronic flash — guide number 16, two cells, taller and less common · A1L flash — the small low-power unit of the XA4 era, found on late bodies · Fabric wrist strap clipping to an exposed section of the back hinge; no case and no lens cap were made

Olympus published no base length. Modern Photography measured it in 1979 as just over 5/8 in., which it called one of the shortest ever built into a full-frame 35mm camera, and noted that the focusing tab covers the entire range in about half an inch of travel.

Figures we worked out rather than found: Modern Photography gives the rangefinder base length only as 'just over 5/8 in.', which is about 16 mm. At the finder's approximately 0.6× magnification that is an effective base length near 10 mm. Olympus published neither figure and this page records the conversion rather than a specification. · 2.8 ft, the figure in Olympus's own specifications, is 0.853 m. · The size comparison with the Contax T is this project's arithmetic on the two makers' published dimensions: 102 × 64.5 × 40 mm is about 263 cm³, and 98 × 66.5 × 32.5 mm about 212 cm³. Neither company published a volume and no source consulted compares them this way.

Where sources disagree

Minimum focus distance
  • 0.85 m — 2.8 ft in Olympus's own specifications as printed by Modern Photography, November 1979, and on diaxa's specification table
  • 0.9 m (English Wikipedia's specification table)

Better supported: 0.85 m

2.8 ft is 0.853 m. 0.9 m looks like the same figure rounded once through feet and back, and it matters because 0.9 m is also the published close focus of the Rollei B 35 and of most zone-focus compacts — the XA's advantage over them is precisely the few centimetres in question.

Distance from the front element to the film plane
  • 33.6 mm (VisionAge, 'The Olympus XA Story' part 4, 1988, cited by English Wikipedia)
  • approximately 31 mm (Modern Photography, November 1979)

Better supported: 33.6 mm

The VisionAge account is Olympus's own, told by Yanagida Kunio from interviews with the design team, and it presents 33.6 mm as the number that made a 40 mm body possible. Modern Photography's 31 mm is prefixed with 'approximately' and was probably an estimate from the outside of a sealed camera.

Year of release
  • 1979, on sale from May (Olympus corporate chronology)
  • First appeared at photokina in 1978, on the market the following May (diaxa)

Better supported: Both — announcement and sale

Not a real conflict, but it is the reason the camera is dated 1978 in some listings. The two accounts agree on May 1979 for retail availability.

What reviewers say

History

The XA is a rangefinder camera that fits in a shirt pocket, and everything else about it follows from the fact that Olympus refused to accept those two clauses were in conflict.

Maitani Yoshihisa began with clay. He wanted a full-frame 35mm camera thin enough to carry every day, modelled a series of bodies, and settled on 4 cm as the number below which the idea worked and above which it did not — he had already discarded 4.5 cm because the front protruded and, in his account, ruined the whole style. He took the target to Hayamizu Yoshisada, head of the lens division and the designer of the Tessar-type D.Zuiko on the first Pen, who told him a 35mm lens could not be fitted into a body that thin and that 31mm would be needed instead, which would make the camera unsuitable for photographing people.

What came back was a six-element, five-group lens described by Olympus as a reverse retrofocus: a telephoto-type layout that pulls the rear principal plane forward and brings the front element to 33.6 mm from the film plane. It focuses internally, by moving the third group, so the lens neither collapses nor extends. That single decision is the camera. It is why the XA has no folding front where the Minox 35 and the Ricoh FF-1 have one, why the body is rigid rather than hinged, and — because the front of the camera is now a flat, sealed face — why there was room left for a rangefinder.

The rangefinder is tiny by any historical standard. Modern Photography, testing the camera in November 1979, put the base length at just over five-eighths of an inch and called it one of the shortest ever built into a full-frame 35, with the focusing tab traversing the entire range in about half an inch of travel. It works because the lens being focused is a 35mm f/2.8 with generous depth of field, not a fast standard lens; the magazine said as much, and then reported that the patch was easy to see in dim light and snapped satisfyingly into focus once a photographer had got used to the throw.

Around all of this sits the barrier, which is the part everyone remembers. Sliding it open uncovers the lens and finder, retracts a small blind from the rangefinder window, and unlocks the shutter; sliding it shut seals the camera. No lens cap was made and no case, because neither is needed. Underneath, a ridged lever selects +1.5 EV backlight compensation, a battery check that beeps and lights a red LED, and a twelve-second self-timer — and in the self-timer position that lever folds out far enough to act as a foot on a sloping surface.

What cannot be said about this camera is how many were made. Olympus’s chronology records the launch date and stops. No review carries a figure. There is no published serial decoder, so nothing can be inferred from the numbers either — the only serial in this entry that can be dated at all is 125475, which was Modern Photography’s test body in late 1979. A figure of twenty to thirty thousand a month circulates online, which would put the run near two million; it traces back to an unsourced forum post and nothing else, and it is recorded here only so that a reader who meets it elsewhere knows what it rests on. For a camera this famous, that absence is the most surprising thing on the page.

Two smaller numbers are contested and can be pinned down more usefully. The close focus is 0.85 m: 2.8 ft in Olympus’s own published specifications, which Wikipedia’s table rounds to 0.9 m, and the difference matters because 0.9 m is exactly what the zone-focus compacts of the period managed without a rangefinder at all. And the front-element-to-film-plane distance is 33.6 mm on Olympus’s own telling of the design story, against the approximately 31 mm that Modern Photography estimated from the outside. The first is the number the engineers were working to. The second is what a reviewer could measure.

Expand Collapse

This history is AI-written, from the sources listed at the foot of the page. Where the record is silent it says so rather than filling the gap — but no human wrote these sentences.

Example photos

Sample photo taken with the Olympus XA
Olympus XA — Martintoy, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Sample photo taken with the Olympus XA
Olympus XA, barrier open — Ashley Pomeroy, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Sample photo wanted — shot with a Olympus XA? We'd love to feature it (with credit).

Live listings

Asking price, USD: a median of $200 across 65 fixed-price listings on 2026-09-11 (middle half $150–$230). Tracked since 2026-09-06, 2 days: down 1% from $200.

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2026-09-11$200$150–$23065
2026-09-06$200$170–$23054

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Related: Olympus XA2

Sources (9)

Every page here is assembled from public sources, and the gaps are real ones. If you own this camera, know a serial number I'm missing, or can see where I have it wrong, tell me — corrections, serials and sample photos are all worth having.