Olympus OM-1

It's a new toy :) While shopping for a fresh bottle of fixer at Calumet (a hopeless quest btw), I noticed they had a couple of new shelves full of old 35mm gear.  The strange part - most of it was reasonably priced (especially for a big name old-school non-online store not named ebay, craigslist, or rangefinderforum.com).  There was the standard Nikon AI/AIS lenses and some old Canon FD stuff, but this little guy stood out from the pack. 

First Impressions

1. Very small.  I have pretty small hands and this thing just disappears into them.  It's comparable (and probably smaller than) the Nikon FM2n I used to carry around.  
2. Viewfinder is clean.  By clean I mean uncluttered - besides the analog meter in the lower left corner the viewfinder is completely free from shooting information.  To some this is a bad thing - I'll admit that seeing aperture/shutter info in the VF has its benefits - but sometimes you just want to see the scene without clutter of any kind. 
3. The On/Off switch is inconvenient at best, straight annoying at worst.  You can see the layout from the birds eye picture above, instead of following almost every other SLR company Olympus decided to put the meter On/Off as a rotating switch that's decoupled from the shutter mechanism.  This is annoying for a couple of reasons - the first is battery drain (inadvertently leaving the switch in the On position will drain the battery).  The second reason is ergonomics - if you're framing with the camera and notice that the meter is off it's almost impossible to reach up with your left hand and switch on the meter without taking your eye from the frame.  
4. The control layout is different from any other SLR I've used.  The standard configuration is to place the shutter speed on the top plate next to the shutter button and the aperture control on the lens. Olympus decided to buck this trend by putting the shutter speed around the base of the lens mount and the aperture control of the lens around the filter area of the lens.  
5. The film advance isn't quite as smooth as I'd like it to be.  I've handled damn near every 35mm Nikon, along with a couple of Leica's and the Oly isn't even close - the F3HP just absolutely destroys the OM-1 (and the M3 dual stroke just back from a CLA is just heavenly).    

That's it for first impressions, I'm working my way through a roll of Tri-X so I'll be able to write more on this camera later - hopefully the shutter speeds and meter are accurate (they seem pretty good so far).