by Olan Pays

The year was 1936 when Olympus introduced its very first Olympus camera, the 120 roll film bellows camera Semi-Olympus I. Only the lens, a fixed Zuiko 75mm F4.5 was made by Olympus; the body was made by The Proud Company, and the shutter was a German Auto Compur. Its successor, the Semi-Olympus II however was a full Olympus product with a Koho shutter.

Olympus continued to enhance their technology and produced their high quality Olympus camera. Their success story as a manufacturer of small innovative cameras began in 1959 with the launch of the Olympus PEN. Then Olympus changed the model to PEN S, and many models were to follow. They all had one thing in common: a small size, using the half-frame (18x24mm) 35mm film format, affordable quality Olympus camera.

In 1981, Olympus launched the C-AF, the first Olympus camera with Auto Focus (Infra Red controlled) and also the first with built-in flash. This models are the symbol of a revolution in camera technology. With its compact rangefinder looks like the 35 RD / 35 DC etc. series but with AF electronics instead of the rangefinder it belongs to two completely different worlds.

When it comes to digital era, Olympus introduced their P&S style Olympus cameras in 1996; the highest resolution (C-800) was 810.000 pixels. In 1998 they introduced the C-1400, a Zoom Lens reflex (ZLR) model (SLR with built-on zoom lens). It had 1.400.000 pixels, aka 1 Megapixel. Olympus continued to produce their 2 Megapixel Olympus camera, model C-2500L in 1999.

The 3 Megapixel Olympus camera was launched in 2000. The C-3000 Zoom has 3.34 Megapixel. The two high-end models introduced at the Photokina 2000, the 4-MegaPixel E-10 and the 1.5-MegaPixel, 15fps E-100RS.

Constantly at the leading edge of innovation, Olympus have produced many models with higher resolution and higher quality. Today, they offered many type of end user an Olympus camera to fulfill their needs.