Approx. dates of manufacture: 1984-1988
Lens Mount: Olympus OM
Battery: two 1.5v LR44 (357)
Approx. original price: $279.95
Approx. street value:$100
Acquired in a box of parts cameras, along with a couple more dead Olympus OM bodies , about half a Yashica something, a black Mamiya 1000 DTL, and a couple more skeletons that are unidentifiable. I used to have a huge early Pentax SLR but I think it went to Pentax heaven.
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For years I thought this was a wreck. It wasn't until I was poking through the parts box again that I realized it was complete, except for a lens and the screw-cover for the motor-drive linkage. I'd subsequently acquired an Olympus-mount lens, so I dropped in the necessary batteries and was shocked to find that it fired consistantly, and everything appears to work. Next up will be to drop a roll of film in it and see how it goes.
(Even though it looks complete also, my plain OM-2 is still dead.)
Olympus was (is) an interesting company. They always lagged behind the big guys (Canon, Minolta and Nikon) for the mass market, so they tended to cut their own niche. In the 1960s, they led the half-frame 35mm (see my Canon Demi) with their Pen series. In the 1970s, they felt confident enough to introduce their own full-frame SLR, which they called the OM-1. But rather than just make a "me too" camera, they engineered the hell out of it and made it smaller and lighter than the competition, but made sure that the quality was there.
The result was a big splash and a controversy over whether smaller and lighter was better or just flimsey; ultimately the others followed the ground Olympus broke.
The OM-1 was a middle-teir camera; they followed up with the professional level OM-2, and again, Olympus made sure they had a compelling reason for people to buy it. The best of the new features was the off-the-film (OTF) plane metering, which many people felt was far superior to the in-camera metering that measured the light off the ground glass in the pentaprism. The OTF metering worked particularly well with their integrated flash unit, which took its reading from the camera meter; other makers' flash units read the metering off-camera. That made the flash particuarly accurate, and even if you took the flash off-camera (but teathered it to the hot-shoe), you could flash your subject and still use the camera's viewpoint for the meter readings.
It didn't hurt that Olympus made sure their optics could stand up against Nikon and Canon; and a lot of professionals bought it. It was successful enough that they upgraded it a couple times. According to a FAQ, the S model was an extensive redisign and added a lot of capabilities to an otherwise gee-whiz camera.
The problem was that they didn't have another hole card to play after this; they upgraded the OM-1 as the OM-3, and the OM-2 as the OM-4. The went down-market a bit with the OM-10, and released a slew of rangefinders to compete against Canon's Sure Shot series. But the fireworks were over; the subsequent OM bodies were evolutionary, not revolutionary. Then they lost ground rapidly in the 80s as Minolta smoked everyone with the autofocus Maxxum; Canon and Nikon made the hard choices and eventually caught up but Olympus struggled. They were, however, early into digital and made a lot of nice consumer level cameras, but haven't figured out how to steal a march on Canon and Nikon and set themselves apart.
Not yet, anyway.