Olympus Kogaku

Founded in 1919 as Takachiho Seisakusho, the company’s first products were microscopes. The first camera was the “Semi-Olympus” in 1936. The company eventually changed its name to Olympus Optical Co. in 1949 and set about to create a series of notable innovations in “smallness”. The half-frame Olympus Pen and the OM-series of SLRs in the 70s revealed that it was indeed possible to take all the current technology and repackage it in smaller bodies. It can be arguably stated that Olympus began the movement toward smaller and lighter cameras that was embraced by most other manufacturers in the mid 1970s.

Additional Olympus Resources
Olympus Zuiko Interchangeable Lenses Group (PDF)