Yoshihisa Maitani

Yoshihisa Maitani (January 8, 1933 – July 30, 2009) was a designer of cameras for the Japan-based camera manufacturer Olympus Corporation.

After studying mechanical engineering at university, he joined Olympus Optical Co., Ltd. (now Olympus Corporation) in 1956. Maitani went on to work for them for 40 years. He was involved with the design of many of the company's most well-known cameras, including the Pen and the Pen F half frame cameras,

Career Maitani credits Eiichi Sakurai, a keen photographer, with shifting Olympus from microscopes to cameras starting in 1935. When he was attending middle and high school, Maitani belonged to a photography club, using the family camera, a Leica IIIf; because he regarded it more as a hobby than a career, he enrolled in Waseda University to study automotive engineering, but continued to spend his free time in photography. After Sakurai learned that Maitani had filed a camera patent as a student, he recruited Maitani to work for Olympus. Using his factory experience, Maitani began cutting costs where he could and upon seeing the finished prototype, Sakurai approved production, but the factory manager refused, calling what would be sold as the Olympus Pen a "toy camera", so manufacturing of the half-frame camera was outsourced instead. At the time, most cameras were manufactured at a rate of a few hundred per month; Maitani set an optimistic production target of 5,000 per month, and the company was astonished to find the camera sold out so quickly.

The low price also opened a new market for cameras: a month after it launched, Maitani watched a mother photographing her child using a Pen, but he realized that with the settings she had chosen, the picture would not be in focus, so he next designed a prototype with simplified controls, requiring just a single button press. The head of the sales department argued with Maitani over this philosophy, believing that real photographers required many controls and fearing that such a simple camera would not sell. After completing the prototype, the head of sales played with the camera for half an hour in silence, then enthusiastically encouraged production to start, resulting in the Pen EE.

Because Kodak refused to create half-frame slide mounts, the American market for the Pen F was limited, and the head of exports began pressuring Maitani to develop a full-frame SLR. As a small company, Olympus could not afford to continue both the half-frame and full-frame programs, so initially the sales department began exploring the possibility of rebadging another manufacturer's products. Maitani was aghast: why would anyone buy a camera rebadged as an Olympus when they could simply buy the original camera instead?

After he had used SLRs reluctantly for macro photography, as the Leica were not optimized for that use, Maitani realized that SLR weight and size posed another barrier to broad acceptance; by the end of 1967, he had convinced Sakurai to pursue a small, light SLR. Maitani set a target of half: and 20% reduction in height and depth, resulting in a camera that would be approximately half the weight and volume of a Nikon F. To optimize the utilization of internal space, the shutter speed control was moved to the lens mount. The resulting Olympus M-1, later renamed OM-1, had come about through a process that Maitani called his "unreasonable demand to reduce the size and weight by half", adding that "repetitions of this process eventually led to the creation of something that photographers want, something that I wanted. If something is not available to buy, you have to make it yourself." A few years later, Olympus released the OM-2, which used an electronically-timed shutter and exposure meter that measured light reflected from the film.

After the OM-2, Olympus's market share for 35mm compact cameras began to fall and Maitani was enlisted to help design a new product. These rough concepts were developed eventually into the Olympus XA, which was the first camera to win a Good Design Award.

text=Many of the cameras that I have developed have been unique Olympus-style products. And there's a reason for that. I was simply trying to make things that you couldn't buy anywhere.When the Monkey King boasted that he could fly to the end of the Earth, the Buddha told him to go. And indeed he flew to the end of the Earth and returned after signing his name on the wall. When he got back, the Buddha smiled and showed him the inside of his finger. "Here is your signature," he said. If you think about it, everything is in the hand of the Buddha.I love cameras, and I have willfully proclaimed my determination to create cameras that have never existed before. Yet when I think about it now, it seems to be that everything was in the hand of Olympus. I'm sure that Olympus will continue to create unique cameras, and that those who love Olympus cameras will remain loyal users. Olympus cameras are a little unusual, but I hope that you will continue to understand and support those cameras. — Yoshihisa Maitani, Special Lecture (Nov 2005) and the ads, crediting him as a mononymous genius, were running by early 1980.

Although some have credited Maitani with the design of the Olympus Stylus (1991), Maitani retired from Olympus in 1996.