The story of the half-frame camera begins with a number, not a lens. In the late 1950s Olympus asked a young designer, Maitani Yoshihisa, for a camera an ordinary person could afford, and the company’s own history is specific about what that meant: six thousand yen. A Leica cost a year’s wages. Six thousand yen was a month’s, roughly, and it bought a very small camera or a very poor one. Maitani’s way out was to use half of each frame of 35mm film. An 18 by 24 millimetre picture needs a smaller lens, a smaller shutter and a smaller body than a full frame, and a roll of thirty-six gives you seventy-two of them, which in 1959 was an economy you could feel.
What the Pen was
The Pen went on sale in October 1959. It had a four-element 28mm f/3.5 lens, a Copal shutter with four speeds from 1/25 to 1/200, a scale on the lens for focusing and nothing at all for exposure: no meter, no automation, no rangefinder. It was the size of a cigarette packet and Olympus could not build them fast enough, so the first year’s cameras were made by a subcontractor, Sanko-Shoji, and carry one strap lug where every later Pen has two. The Pen S of 1960 gave it seven speeds and a 30mm f/2.8. Seventeen million half-frame Pens were sold before the line ended in the early 1980s, by Olympus’s count, and nobody has ever published how many were the plain first one.
What Maitani did next tells you what the format was for. In 1961 the Pen EE put a selenium cell in a ring around the lens, gave the shutter two speeds the meter chose between, fixed the focus, and added a red flag that rose in the finder and locked the release when the light ran out. It removed every decision. The EE ran twenty-two years and nine badges and is most of those seventeen million. In 1962 the Pen D went the other way, with a six-element f/1.9 and a meter that only advised, for the people who wanted to decide. In 1963 the Pen F made the format a system: a reflex with a sideways mirror, a rotary titanium shutter that synchronised flash at every speed, a flat top with no prism hump, and Zuikos from 20mm to 800mm. Nobody else built a half-frame SLR, then or since, until Kyocera’s camcorder-shaped Samurai in 1987.
Everyone follows
The Pen’s success pulled the whole Japanese industry into the format inside four years, and the way each company answered says something about it. Canon arrived in 1963 with the Demi, which wrapped rounded metal panels over its corners and came, for a few months, in red, white and blue; it had a match-needle meter and let you choose. Ricoh’s Auto Half of 1962 asked nothing at all: fixed focus, automatic aperture, and a spring motor in the base so nothing needed winding, in a flat case with a patterned front that changed with the fashions. Ricoh’s own history calls it a massive hit, particularly with women. Fuji put the sharpest lens of the class on the Fujica Half. Minolta, Konica and Agfa each made two or three. Canon put a clockwork motor into a grip and a ring of CdS cells around the lens and called it the Dial 35.
By the late 1960s it was over as a mass market. Full-frame compacts had learned the Pen EE’s tricks, film had become cheap, and the small negative was harder to print well. The Pen EE-3 sold until 1983 on habit. Konica’s Recorder of 1984 put autofocus, a motor and a flash on a half frame and was the last serious one from a major maker for forty years.
The number comes back
Then film got expensive again. In 2022 a fifty-dollar acrylic-lensed camera with Kodak’s name on it, made by Reto in Hong Kong, sold in numbers nobody has published, because seventy-two frames for the price of thirty-six had started to matter to people who were twenty. Two years later Ricoh Imaging, which now owns Pentax, released the first new film camera from a major Japanese maker in about two decades, and made it a half-frame. The Pentax 17 has a manual advance lever and a rewind crank on purpose, a lens whose design Ricoh says descends from the 1962 Auto Half, and a price of $499. Its reviewers argue about the price and agree about the pleasure, which is where the Pen’s reviewers were sixty-five years earlier.
I find the symmetry hard to resist. The half frame was invented to hit a price and revived because of one. In between it was a fashion, then a habit, then a curiosity. Maitani went on to design the OM-1 and the XA, both of which are on these pages, but the six-thousand-yen camera is the one that made a format out of a compromise. The family pages for seventeen of these cameras are in the half-frame section, and I have tried to say on each one which lens it carried, which changed, and how many were made where anyone knows, which is almost nowhere.