OlympusTrip MD3

Place the Olympus Trip MD3 in context and you land in the last full decade of mass-market film, before APS and digital fought over the leftovers. Catalogued as a point & shoot, it pairs the Olympus 34mm f/5.6 with a 35mm film path. Worth knowing up front: the last true 'Trip' — a 1990s plastic descendant of the legendary 1967 Olympus Trip 35, sharing only the name and the slide-out lens cover.

Format

35mm

Year

1996

Lens

Olympus 34mm f/5.6

Min. focus

1.5 m

Flash

Built-in with on/off switch

Battery

2× AA

Don't expect heroics in low light from the Olympus 34mm f/5.6; expect a tiny camera that drops into a coat pocket and never argues about it. Film supply is a non-issue: any 35mm cassette from any lab works. It runs on common AA batteries — you can resurrect one on a Sunday afternoon with whatever the corner shop has in stock. The built-in flash will fire whenever the meter decides it should, so learn the override before your first night out. Minimum focus is 1.5 m, close enough for a coffee cup or a face but stops short of true macro. Worth knowing in the field: that 34mm f/5.6 is unusually wide for a fixed-focus toy compact — good for street snaps where everything past 1.5m is sharp enough. The 35mm field of view sits halfway between observer and participant; it suits anything where you want the viewer to feel in the scene.

Reputation is doing a lot of the price work on the Olympus Trip MD3; the camera is good, but pay for the camera, not the legend. A footnote that often comes up: dX-coded ISO detection is the one modern touch; everything else is deliberately dumbed down for the disposable-camera crowd.

• §1The last true 'Trip' — a 1990s plastic descendant of the legendary 1967 Olympus Trip 35, sharing only the name and the slide-out lens cover.
• §2That 34mm f/5.6 is unusually wide for a fixed-focus toy compact — good for street snaps where everything past 1.5m is sharp enough.
• §3DX-coded ISO detection is the one modern touch; everything else is deliberately dumbed down for the disposable-camera crowd.