Olympus-PEN EE-2 - can you recommend me a film?

[eumenius]

Hello friends,

the weather in Moscow gets better, and my flu doesn't - anyway, I just think it will be better someday I got an old Olympus-PEN EE-2, half frame automatic, in a perfectly working condition (repaired it myself). The electronic eye works too, of course. I tried to put a roll of Fuji Superia in it - well, the results were on a disappointing side... the film seems to be a crar for the purpose. I think slide film won't be properly exposed by all this primitive automatic stuff, too - but maybe I should try? Maybe anyone tried to shoot tiny slides with it, so I don't have to ruin a roll of expensive film? The colour negs coming out of it were almost all equally well-exposed, judging by the eye. I understand that I can't expect much from half frame, of course - but I want to have this Olympus with colour film in my bag, using it as a scratch book. Can you recommend me the colour film to use? I am mostly in MF B/W, so I just can't decide for myself

Cheers from Moscow,
Zhenya

 

[Woolliscroft]

I'd use fairly slow fine grain film to get the most out of the small size and stick to neg film so that you have a chance to correct for less than perfect exposures.

David

 

[Donald Qualls]

I've used Kodak Max 400 in my Pen EES-2 (very similar to your EE-2, probably the same Zuiko 30/2.8 lens) and been pretty happy with it for small prints. In fact, I used ASA 400 color print film in this camera twenty years ago and liked it then, for small prints.

And small prints are really the norm for the 18x24 frame in any case. Yes, you can enlarge; they make good 5x7 and pretty decent 8x10 if everything is just right -- but there's no substitute for negative area (to paraphrase the old drag racer's creed). Pretty much any of the Kodak ISO 200 or ISO 400 consumer films should work nicely. If you like B&W, you can probably get pretty big prints from T-Max 100 (though it's not much more tolerant of haphazard exposure than slide films), Delta 100, or even from traditional medium speed films like Plus-X, Fomapan 100, or FP4+, and you might want to try a roll of XP-2 Super or one of the Kodak C-41 B&W films.

The problem you'll always have with C-41 in that camera, of course, is that although any mini-lab can process the film, almost none of them can/will print the half-frame correctly; you'll get 2 frames per print and compromise exposures. At least with B&W, you can mask your negative holder and print just a single frame. In that respect, XP-2 Super may be the best C-41; its clear base is intended for printing in a traditional silver-print darkroom, and you can get "negatives only" for $2 to $4 at any one-hour lab.

 

[fparnold]

I have one, and generally recommend slower film, as that lets you put it into aperture priority, and expose manually. I believe the shutter is at 1/50 if you turn the dial to the orange numbers. I shot a variety of back-lit scenes on vacation that way a number of years ago, and they came out pretty well. Cute little camera, and almost convinced me to get a Pen-F, so that I could actually focus, but I was headed into bigger negatives at the time.