Want to Buy Buy or trade for Olympic XA.

[Huss]

I'm impressed how nice the Xa2 (and I'd assume the XA) feels in hand. I think the metal back has a big part in that.

 

[eli griggs]

Cheers

The XA is a lot of fun! I bought my first one in the spring of 1980 and after riding around in the faring pocket of my BMW R75/6 for a year, until it rattled apart. The second one met a quicker death when it was in my jacket pocket and it rained the entire two hundred mile round trip from my house in SE Pennsylvania to Pocono Raceway, plus the time we were at the race. After that the next XA rode in the tank bag for a week and a half, two thousand mile trip to Quebec and back. That one survived the big move west and was sold or traded for a long forgotten camera. There were a couple more as accompaniments to the larger format cameras that were the passion at the time. The last one was traded when I moved to a Leica M6 TTL in the early 2000's. They are really fun little cameras and if I still had one, I would send it to you. Hang in there, you'll get one.

Cheers, it's nice to hear you've enjoyed your XA cameras as much as I liked mine.

 

[Huss]

Test roll in my gifted Olympus XA2, Kentmere 400

 

[Huss]

The thing w the XA2 is the manual suggests that the default focus setting should be used basically all the time. And then mentions in passing if you are not planning to print big.
So yeah. If you want the best pics out of it, don't do that. Try to guestimate distance and use the scales accordingly, including in-between settings.


And back to Eli getting an XA!

 

[eli griggs]

The thing w the XA2 is the manual suggests that the default focus setting should be used basically all the time. And then mentions in passing if you are not planning to print big.
So yeah. If you want the best pics out of it, don't do that. Try to guestimate distance and use the scales accordingly, including in-between settings.


And back to Eli getting an XA!

I like the photos you've shared, a lot t of folks get the focusing wrong on the XA2, or perhaps their camera is some how ill adjusted but the form factor of these earlier cameras is still classic and when handled correctly, give very good results.

Thanks for sharing!

 

[sfphoto]

XA (original) IMHO is the best XA of the bunch (had them all). As for the #4, there were other options perhaps w/ a better lens: Minolta TC-1, Ricoh GR series, Nikon 28Ti

My fixed lens kit for 35mm slides and 120 b&w: