Olympus Ace / Ace E
The Olympus Ace was the only interchangeable lens, 35mm rangefinder camera ever built by Olympus. There were two models: the original Ace and the later Ace E, which added an uncoupled selenium cell light meter. The design of the Ace was heavily influenced by both the Leica M3 and Nikon's line of rangefinder cameras. Like the M3, the Ace has a combined viewfinder and rangefinder. The viewfinder of the Ace has bright lines for 35mm, 45mm, and 80mm focal lengths - which also happen to be the only focal lengths Olympus ever produced for this camera. One difference between the Ace and its Leica and Nikon competition is that the Ace uses a leaf shutter instead of a focal plane shutter. This means that the Ace is quieter than either of these other cameras, but only has a top speed of 1/500.
The Ace uses a unique bayonet lens mount that is only found on this camera. Olympus introduced the Ace in 1958 with three lenses: a 35mm f/2.8, 45mm f/2.8, and 80mm f/5.6. They would later release a faster 80mm f/4.
The camera has the standard array of features common to rangefinder cameras of this time. The shutter and aperture are set manually. The camera has a hinged back door for easy loading. The bright lines in the viewfinder compensate for parallax as the lenses are focused closer. The Ace also has a mechanical self-timer but, as with all such self-timers, you are probably best ignoring this mechanism altogether.
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