Problem with olympus XA

[darinwc]

I have an Olympus XA that I puchased a few years back.
I went through the process of cleaning it thouroughly and replacing the light seals.

My first roll I was very very unhappy with.
I thought that maybe the rangefinder was out of alignment. Nothing seemed to be in focus.

But I was looking the camera today, and it appears that the meter is about 3 stops off! Could that account for the general fuzzyness of the photos? An under-exposed negative would certainly be grainy washed-out. I have attached the example.

So, I could just adjust the ISO to compensate. But will the exposure compensation be consistant across varying lighting conditions?

Is there anything I can adjust to fix the problem?

( I allready tried fresh batteries)

 

[Domenico Foschi]

The meter is a problem, but not the kind of problem that could give unsharp images.
The picture you posted is not awfully out of focus, and if am not wrong it looks a bit blurry as well.
What exposure time did you use?
The box to the right seems to be in focus if it wasn't for the light blur.

 

[Brian Legge]

I get the sense that a 1/10 of a second exposure may have been required by the lighting in the room. I'd wager it was iso 400 film with an exposure of f/2.8 at 1/10th of a second or so.

Maybe I'm just biased as my first experience with an XA involved a bunch of low light shooting which didn't work out too well for me due to exposure length.

 

[Chan Tran]

I think the problem is more to do with a long shutter speed due to the low light. With the Olympus XA the circuit that show you shutter speed in the viewfinder and the circuit that control the shutter speed are totally independent. So looking at the shutter speed scale can't tell if the camera will over or underexposure. It's an Olympus thing. The same can be said for the OM2.

 

[darinwc]

Unsharp: I think the example shows that the shutter speed was slow enough to be affected by camera shake. F2.8 and 1/10th sounds about right

XA meter: as crap! How in the world am I supposed to test it?

 

[removed account4]

could it also be that
the magnets that operate the
shutter are getting tired ?

 

[ic-racer]

"three stops off" so your negatives are three stops OVER or UNDER exposed?
Try compensating the ISO by 3 stops and shoot some images in dark and daylight conditions. If the exposure is OK on both you are set. I'd not get too upset about the shutter speed readout in the window as it will be quit difficult to correlate that to an actual shutter speed without a shutter speed tester.

The picture posted is severely affected by camera motion artifact.

 

[John Hermanson]

If XA is calibrated in the proper order, with the proper batteries (silver oxide only), the shutter speed will be very close to the indicated speed. Wrong batteries alone can give incorrect needle position but still give correct shutter speed. 1/10th shutter speed could easily allow camera shake. Electromagnets don't wear out, but they do get oil on them which will cause wildly erratic overexposure. John

 

[darinwc]

AK! the dreaded silver-oxide battery strikes again! I did not realize the XA required these. I should know better considering I've been into Olympus gear lately.

OK I installed fresh 357's. It did make a difference. The display meter is still off from my other XA but its closer now. I will run another roll through and see how it looks.

 

[darinwc]

Unsharp: I think the example shows that the shutter speed was slow enough to be affected by camera shake. F2.8 and 1/10th sounds about right

XA meter: as crap! How in the world am I supposed to test it?

 

[Q.G.]

XA meter: as crap! How in the world am I supposed to test it?

Put a roll of slide film in the camera, and go out and expose it.
Choose many different subjects, challenging ('exposurewise') and 'plain sailing'.
Have the film developed and see what you get.

 

[John Hermanson]

Since meter position and actual auto speed are calibrated separately and are not cross coupled, the meter could be off, with auto speeds good, vice versa or neither. Slide film would be best for showing exposure errors as latitude is much narrower than print film. It will also show the XA lens vignetting more prominently. John

 

[elekm]

That was the case with my XA. Initially, the speed indicated by the meter needle wasn't the actual speed. After some use, the needle seemed to more closely reflect the actual speed.

Nice little camera, although perhaps a bit too light in weight for shooting handheld at slower speeds.

I think a better test for accurate focus would be in shots in which the shutter speed stays above 1/60.

 

[totalmotard]

What ever you do, don't drop it! I dropped mine and the indicator needle stopped working. Shutter and meter are still fine, but I have to guess where the shutter speed will be.