I have a few hours to kill and I thought I might as well ask around. Anyone own the Pen F/FT? Still using it?
FWIW, I do for the past 10 years or so.
I do wish that Olympus would bring back that compactness/ergonomics associated with the Pen F.
Used to have an FT. The mechanical construction was clever (rotary sector shutter, sideways-flipping mirror, and so forth), the handling was great for such a small-bodied camera, and they made some nice lenses for it, especially the medium teles.
But I thought the finder brightness was subpar (the FV was supposed to be better than the FT because it didn't siphon off light for a TTL meter) and the metering system was clunky to use, with those arbitrary numbers and the extra scale on the bottom of the aperture ring.
It always struck me as one of those cases in which they concentrated all their smarts on one area (the internal mechanical design) and didn't leave much bandwidth to expend on other areas such as practicality and usability.
That's probably why gadget freaks such as myself liked the
idea a lot, but found we didn't like using the actual
camera so much. As an object of contemplation it was lots of fun... but for taking pictures we found we got along better with a more mundane full-frame Minolta or Canon or Nikon or whatever.