Yongsan Korea find, Olympus Pen EE-3 half frame.

[Army35mm]

Was walking around the iPark mall in Yongsan, Korea today, bugging all the camera vendors for film SLR lenses. This one vendor shows me a pretty clean Minolta x-700, and an olympus pen ee 3. He wanted 130k won for the Minolta, and declined selling me the olympus,telling me in broken English , "too much, too much".

I walked, and came back to the same kiosk about half an hour later,kept bugging him for it, and he finally tried to sell it to me for 200k won(roughly $166usd)

I called bullshit immediately, googled an eBay auction for one for 17 bucks, and offered him 25000 won(line 20 dollars) for it. He accepted after some haggling and a trying couple walk - aways.

This camera is really nice, a tad bit dusty, but overall really nice, and the selenium light meter works perfectly. Didn't have any film with me, but I found someone who had some old expired Kodak 200 for cheap, so I'm currently running a roll of that through it right now.

 

[removed account4]

nice camera !
(there was a url link here which no longer exists)
there is a link to repair/overhaul instructions if you need to tweek it.
https://www.flickr.com/groups/penee/discuss/
and there is the name &c of a repair guy who has been repairing
them for a long time ....
not sure if john h. at camtech works on them or not
http://www.zuiko.com
he overhauled my penFT, and replaced stuff that was hard to find ...

half frame is a lot of fun --
have fun with your new toy !

 

[Cholentpot]

I use this camera extensively. I also use expired gold 200 extensively.

Don't mess with ISO film over 100 with this half frame. Your results might be a little disappointing. I tend to stick with ISO 100 b&w film for my Pen. Great camera, lots of fun to use.

As for the Gold 200...ugh. It does not age well. Some of the worst film I've shot expired. I found it needs to be rated at 25 to get decent shots. But it gives some pretty cool color shifts and gnarly grain.

 

[Army35mm]

Just got two rolls of agfa 100bw and a single of kentmere100 bw to feed it. Tossed the gold 200 roll, and I'm almost done with a roll of fuji200 color. Gonna be shooting this stuff for a while.

 

[Anirudha Ambekar]

That is awesome!
The way you bought it I mean.
If you conduct workshops on "haggling with camera vendors" while you are in Seoul I'll certainly attend one. Specially Yongsan is tough.

 

[Army35mm]

The secret is just to walk away, or convince them the item they have is crap. About to come back to chungmuro camera street on Friday and pull the same thing to try to talk this guy down on an old Russian helios 44-2 lens for my yashica.