Arran Salerno.com

The humble little Olympus Trip 35 was built between 1968 and 1984. Thats such an impressive life span for a camera that remained mainly unchanged the whole time.
Want to find out how old yours is? The best way to discover the age of your Olympus Trip 35 isnt by looking at its top plate serial number, but by looking under the film pressure plate.
It’s a very simple process and with only a few steps to follow.
First of all you need to remove the pressure plate attached to the film door. Its the black square object in the centre of the film door you can see in the picture of it below.

To take it off you must slide the metal tabs off the plastic pins. You do this one side at a time by pushing the metal tab inwards using either your fingers or a screwdriver/knife. Once you do that, the pressure place can be fully removed.

Once you have the plate off you can now see the characters printed underneath, these will accurately tell you the age of your camera. The photo below shows that date stamping of one of my cameras that we’ll be using as an example :

As you can see, there are 3 characters. A Japanese character and two numbers.
This is how to read it :

1st character - The plant it was manufactured in
2nd character - The last digit of the year of assembly. (so “4″ = 1974, “9″ = 1979, “0″ = 1980, etc..)
3rd character - The month of assembly. (1 - 9 signifies January - September. Then X,Y,Z is for October - December)

Now the observant people would of noticed that if you had “82″ on the pressure plate it could either be Feb 1968 or Feb 1978. The way to find out what decade it belongs to is by looking at the shutter button. If its the chrome variety you have the earlier model, if its the black plastic variety you know you have the later model.

So based on all of this information my camera above was built in March 1973. My other cameras were built in ‘74 and ‘76. If you can find one from the 60’s it’s probably worth hanging onto. Wait a minute, who am i kidding? ALL Olympus Trips are worth hanging onto!!

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 10th, 2008 at 3:15 pm and is filed under Camera, Olympus, Tech/Repairs.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.