Olympus Trip 35 Age Explanation
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!!
12 Responses to “Olympus Trip 35 Age Explanation”
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[...] camera back in the eighties. I keep on meaning to follow the instructions to get the date from this blog... prcloud.wordpress.com/2011/02/23/olympus-trip-35
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Mine is N0X, does that means October 1980?
It would be interesting knowing which factory is designated by N.
Mine is the same as your almost! same plant manufactured but a 34
Thanks for the tip. Turns out mine was from October 76. My parents used the camera on all our vacations when I was a kid. We also had a big bulky flash that we had to attach on the top and plug a small cable in to the front of the camera. Then we had to wait for about a minute before the flash was ready.
Hi Christian.
It’s great when a camera has a bit of sentimental value and history to it. I hope you still use the camera.
Cheers
thanks for the information! my trip says N2X so I believe it is from October 1982.
can’t wait to test it out!
Mine is N19, and I have got the plastic shutter button version, so I was guessing either September 1971 or September 1981. When did the plastic shutter button come into effect? my model number is 4890870, So I guess 1971 would be more correct considering how many were produced.
Thanks for the explanations.
So, after looking at mine it has 8-7 (the 7 is in a circle). Any thoughts on how that would read?
hi um i’m new to collecting cameras and i love cameras but when i looked in my plate i see a faded 8 and a dash and a 7 with a circle around it so it looks like
8 – 7 with a circle around the seven what does it mean
Hello
My Trip has N 66 under the plate and the top serial is 3511023
How old could it be
James Stephenson
Hi James. If you look at the guide you’ll see your camera could of been built in 1966 or 1976. You can figure out which year by looking at the shutter button (assuming it’s original). Is it chrome or black? Chrome is earlier than the black shutter button. Good luck!
Hi ! I’ve found same indications on my Olympus Pens !