For this week's camera, we swing the pendulum from medium format to sub-miniature. The Olympus Pen EES-2 is a half-frame camera from 1968-1971. It uses regular 35mm film, but it produces a 24x18mm image instead of the usual 24×36. This makes it a great camera for traveling, as you can fit up to 72 images on one roll.
The EES-2 uses a 30mm f2.8 lens which is roughly equivalent to 45mm on a full-frame camera. It's a viewfinder camera with a guess focus system. The lens barrel has four pictographs ranging from portrait to landscape with a positive notch at each. Exposure is automatically controlled using a selenium cell mounted circumferentially around the lens. Exposures from f2.8 to f22 may also be manually selected with what I believe is a 1/40 shutter speed. Automatic shutter speeds are 1/40 or 1/200. It has both a hot shoe and a flash sync socket.
The Pen series of cameras was designed to be small and light for everyday use. While it is a nice size, I don't find it appreciably smaller than a lot of my other cameras. If fact, it is both larger and heavier than my Olympus 35RC rangefinder.
I'm using mystery film this week. I found a pair of bulk loaders with film for $10 at a flea market last weekend. The right thing would be to run a test roll, but instead I've loaded a short roll in the Pen. I don't have the patience for a full roll of 48 or 72 shots. I've discovered in the darkroom that the film appears to be good Kodak Tri-X 400. As I don't know how old it is, I've rated it at 320ASA. We'll know soon.
References:
Olympus Pen series at Camera-Wiki
Manual from Mike Butkus
Oly Pen EE-series on eBay.
Notes from Mosquito Hill 