I can't believe Olympus walked away from this camera – if only we had it now

Olympus PEN-F in a leather case on a garden wall
(Image credit: Rod Lawton)

I had to get it shipped by a friend in the US, pay some stiff UK import duty and endure the Kafka-esque communications and radio silences of an international shipping company I won't name... but it was all worth it.

So what is the best retro camera on the market today? The Fujifilm X100 VI? The Leica Q3? The Nikon Zf? They’re all very worthy contenders, but there used to be another camera that oozed style, build quality, engineering finesse and some brilliant lenses. Yes, the Olympus PEN-F.

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Rod Lawton
Contributor

Rod is an independent photography journalist and editor, and a long-standing Digital Camera World contributor, having previously worked as DCW's Group Reviews editor. Before that he has been technique editor on N-Photo, Head of Testing for the photography division and Camera Channel editor on TechRadar, as well as contributing to many other publications. He has been writing about photography technique, photo editing and digital cameras since they first appeared, and before that began his career writing about film photography. He has used and reviewed practically every interchangeable lens camera launched in the past 20 years, from entry-level DSLRs to medium format cameras, together with lenses, tripods, gimbals, light meters, camera bags and more. Rod has his own camera gear blog at fotovolo.com but also writes about photo-editing applications and techniques at lifeafterphotoshop.com