Interview with Yoshihisa Maitani, published in ‘Classic Camera’, 2001
World-famous as the designer of the Pen, OM and XA series of cameras, Yoshihisa Maitani describes his personal design philosophy:
The cameras that our predecessors left are part of a technological world heritage. That is important to recognize, but I never wanted just to make imitations.
By adhering to this belief, Maitani forged a legacy built on originality, and helped Olympus succeed with the OM System despite entering the SLR market late. In this 2001 interview with Classic Camera, Maitani reflects on the origins, challenges, and guiding principles behind the legendary OM-1.
Classic Camera: Today I’d like to find out about the process that led to the birth of the OM series. What were your first thoughts when the company told you to design an SLR?
Yoshihisa Maitani: The business section requested an SLR camera to export. Basically, they wanted a camera like the top-selling cameras of that time. But I could never bear to make the same camera as another company. My elders in the world of camera design had developed many different cameras. In modern terms they are a part of world heritage, a treasure. Even though that’s true, there’s no need to make the same thing twice. That’s my basic attitude, my philosophy as a designer.
CC: What kind of image did you have of the SLR?
YM: Compared with rangefinders, the strength and appeal of SLRs is in close-up and telephoto photography. Previous manufacturers’ functional changes were improvements, but three problems – size, weight, and a loud shutter – were not tackled. I had felt for a long time that, given my own design opportunity, these three problems must be solved. But my opinion as an individual user is not a sales-oriented opinion. At that time, small and light meant cheap and toy-like, and the big and heavy cameras sold expensively. My ideas differed from the market trends. So my first proposal to the management was not for a small, light camera. It was for a system camera. I suggested that we aim to make a camera that could be attached to Olympus’s microscopes and endoscopes, and to telescopes. Nobody opposed this. Then I thought of the “from the universe to bacteria” slogan. This slogan meant that even if minimizing size was a priority, the system would not be sacrificed.
CC: The road to the start of the OM system’s development wasn’t easy, was it? I heard that when the business department insisted that you decide the specifications quickly, you copied the specs of a different company’s camera and presented them instead?
YM: The first suggestion that I make an SLR came at the end of 1967. In the spring of 1968 meetings started, and the thing with the specs happened that summer [laughs]. At the end of 1968 the managing director who was chairman of the meeting became impatient and said “do whatever you like.” At that time I asked for five years to prepare the whole system. One camera and one interchangeable lens had about the same number of parts. With tens of lenses, motordrives and strobes, there were about 250 items altogether. Designing 250 items takes about five years. I got the green light for my request.
CC: At the time the body was developed, how was the size decided?
YM: Engineers’ attention to small detail means that 1mm difference makes it the world’s smallest camera, 1gm difference makes it the world’s lightest. But I was thinking about the user. The photographer has to take the camera and feel that it’s small and light. Someone taking a ruler to it and saying “Wow, this is small” doesn’t make it small. Then I decided that the weight and volume should be half that of an ordinary SLR, with a 30% cut in dimensions. Now that would feel small! Development started from this basis.
CC: Initially you decided the overall goal. The next thing you had to decide was each component…..
YM: First of all the mount. And because of “From the universe to bacteria”, first of all the universe. We had to make a mount that didn’t vignette when used on a telescope. Or on a microscope. Large aperture lenses, for example f1.2, were designed and tested. The size of the mount was decided so that vignetting did not occur with any of these three. So I didn’t even look at the mount on other company’s cameras. Next I decided the length of the mirror. For a mirror, the longer the better. On the other hand, if it’s too long it will hit the lens when it flips up, so there are limits. But if it’s too short there will be vignetting. The third thing I decided was the interior dimensions of the mirror box. There is a high risk of flare from a small mirror box with reflective inner surfaces. Comparing four other companies’ products, I made it as big as I could. I decided these three things, the whole layout, and the size. And I thought “OK, let’s go with this.”
CC: Big on the inside, but small on the outside was a very difficult problem…..
YM: The engineers were having fits trying to get everything in – their territory kept getting smaller! It was only afterwards that we noticed that the external size was the same as a Leica, we didn’t notice at the time.
CC: Of course it’s a small light camera that’s easy to carry, but you must have been concerned not to affect the handling. Can you talk about that?
YM: If you think of making a small, light camera, normally you would think of reducing the size of the parts that are easy to make small. The result of that is scales that are too small to read, levers that are too small to operate, and a small viewfinder. Looking at it from the user’s point of view that’s completely unacceptable. A small camera must still have big controls. Technically that’s an impossible demand [laughs].
CC: In the OM series, the shutter speed dial is set up as a ring on the camera mount. I don’t think this was linked to the effort to make the camera smaller, so how did it come about?
YM: If you look at the camera’s interior structure, the area around the film advance lever is crammed with parts. Choosing the shutter speed, advancing the film, pressing the shutter button, the main functions are concentrated here. It’s like the camera’s capital city. To improve this situation, I thought about redistributing some functions, rather like relocating some functions of the capital city to outside Tokyo has been discussed. The space under the mirror was completely empty: “Good, I’ll bring the main functions down here.” But the film advance lever and the shutter button can’t be shifted, because of the manual film advance. The shutter speed dial is what can be moved, so let’s relocate the shutter speed governor under the mirror, I thought. I could see that if we did that, the camera would be smaller, but there was no such camera. The shutter dial ends up on the bottom [laughs]. The mechanics could relocate the governor, but how to control it? Using a lot of gears to move it, the shutter drive is forced back on top. That doesn’t make it small. I was baffled. Then I put a big ring around the mount to turn the speed governor underneath. At the beginning, everyone around me said I was crazy [laughs]. In my style of photography, while supporting the lens you can focus, check the depth of field, and change the shutter speed. That’s quite an improvement I think.
CC: The last of the three evils was the shutter noise, wasn’t it? Thanks to the air damper, the quiet sound of the OM-1 was unlike that of an SLR.
YM: Until I found my way to the air damper, I experimented with springs, oil, powder – all sorts of dampers, but none of them were any good. If the damper is too effective, it’s easy for the mirror to stop halfway. Then I remembered a time when we were cleaning the house. A sliding paper door fell down making a “swoosh” noise. That was air of course, and I hit upon using that. The air damper is next to the mirror system – air goes in and out of a cylinder and works as the damper. I bought a sound-level meter and set a test standard of under so many decibels. No other camera has had so much attention paid to its sound, or has an air damper for its mirror.
CC: Finally, the OM series has no shutter lock button. I know there are designers opposed to this, so what was the reason for the decision?
YM: When the camera went on sale, the camera magazines pointed this out and severely criticized it. The counter-argument I wrote then was that you might waste a frame because there’s no shutter lock, but in my experience sometimes you don’t get two chances to take a photo. You miss that unexpected photo opportunity. Whatever camera I’m carrying, I prefer to have the shutter ready to fire immediately. For the same reason, I also shortened the shutter timelag. More than anything else, a camera is for capturing that “moment.”
Maitani Interview Final Word
Through clear conviction and practical brilliance, Maitani approached camera design not as a competition of specs, but as an act of human empathy. This 2001 interview reveals a mind always anchored in purpose — balancing bold ideas with real-world use. The OM-1 wasn’t made to impress on paper; it was made to disappear in the hand and be ready when the moment arrived.
Maitani built a legacy not of machines, but of meaning.