The humble little Olympus Trip 35 was built between 1968 and 1984. That’s an impressive life span for a camera that remained mainly unchanged during its lifespan.

Want to find out how old yours is? The best way to discover the age of your Olympus Trip 35 isn’t by looking at its top plate serial number as some people mention from time to time, but by looking under the film pressure plate. It’s a very simple process and will only take a few minutes.

First of all you need to remove the pressure plate attached to the film door. It’s the black rectangle object in the centre of the film door you can see in the picture below.

To take it off you need to slide the metal tabs off the black pins attached to the film door. Do this one side at a time by pushing the metal tab inwards using either your fingers or a flat edged screwdriver. Once you release one side, sliding out the other side is easy and now you can fully remove the pressure plate.

Now that the the plate off you can easily view 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 “3” = 1973, “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 among you would of noticed that if you had “82” on the pressure plate it could either be February 1968 or February 1978. The way to find out what decade it belongs to is by looking at the shutter button. If it’s the chrome variety you have the earlier model, if it’s the black plastic variety you know you have the later model. I have included a photo below showing the two different types of shutter buttons. The chrome/older variety on the left, with the newer plastic shutter button on the right.

Other age identification details:

• The first black plastic shutter button models started in the second quarter of 1978.
• Earlier models had ASA 25 – 250, the latter 25 – 400.
• In 1969 and 1970 Olympus also produced a number of black bodies with black metal shutter buttons. *These demand a higher price but beware of fakes. One way of checking could be cross referencing the manufacturer year and if it doesn’t wall within ’60 or ’70 you may have a fake. This won’t work of course if they repainted a model from either of these two year but it’s a good start.

So based on all of this information I can conclude my camera above was built in March 1973. My other trip’s were built in ’69 ’74 and ’76. If you can find one from the 60’s it’s probably worth hanging onto as they’re a little more scarce. Wait a minute, who am i kidding? ALL Olympus Trips are worth hanging onto!!

*New addition! I’m the happy owner of this lovely original Olympus Trip in black paint. I think this is one of the best looking cameras Olympus ever made.

Feel free to share the age of your Olympus trip in the comments section below.