I have had my bargain OM-4 for about 2 months now. The only thing I saw looked
wrong to me was that the film pressure plate did not look parallel to the back
cover. The plate was obviously reattached because one can see the impression
mark on the innards of the back cover where one side of the spring was attached.
I had called attention to the salesman at Cooper's before, but he kept saying
that the tension felt fine for him. This evening I went there with both the 4
and 4T and showed him and another salesman a difference in the way the plates
are attached to the back between the two bodies.
This came about because I was there earlier today to ask if there have been
complaints from their customers about the EOS grip. I thought that perhaps
because of the grip being so thick, my hold on the camera was not good enough on
the top right-hand corner, that might have caused not-so-sharp corner in the
bottom left-hand side of the slide film in my test of the mount adapter on the
rented EOS-1n. He had not heard of such a problem. Instead he said that the
EOS or any other cameras could produce softness in focusing if the film pressure
plate was not properly attached. This sort of rang a bell in my head. I had
forgotten about the unevenness of the pressure plate on my 4 and also somewhat
random unsharpness in some of my recent tests and earlier ones involving the 4.
I did not understand the phenomenon. I thought if something was not working
properly, it would show up consistently or repeatedly. Unsharpness happened a
few times when the same settings were repeated, but not every time.
According to him, when the film pressure plate was not properly pressing the
film, it could lead to unsharpness when close to wide open aperture. Now this
could happen quite often an exposure is taken immediately after the film is
wound.
After sometime, a little unevenness on the pressure plate would ease out as the
film adjusts itself its evenness. After all the film has been in coiled state
as it comes out of the canister, it has to be pressured to be made flat.
Even though the pressure plate on my 4 I purchased from him looked O.K. to him
but he now acknowledged the plate was obviously reattached. He suggested that I
take the camera to a new branch of the store tomorrow where a technician is on
hand to check the cameras brought in to the store as a part of Canon promotion.
The technician is from a D.C. camera repair shop and the camera body does not
have to be a Canon.
When I came home, I rechecked my lens tests with the 4 rather than 4T. The
blurring of the image with the 4 happened a few times when I repeated a shot
under the same settings. When I repeated the shots with the self-timer on, the
blurring did not occur. Therefore the culprit could be the film pressure plate
and not the tripod or the lens support I was using.
To be continued tomorrow.
Tomoko Yamamoto
mailto:tomokoy@xxxxxxxxx
http://www.charm.net/~tomokoy/
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