I have just bought an Olympus IS-1000 SLR on a whim (it was cheap). Everything seems to work perfectly, except I can't see an image in the viewfinder.
Ah! I thought, remembering my OM-2SP which flicks the mirror up and dies when the battery gets low. A new battery gets the mirror down and the camera ready to go. So I put new batteries in. No image. Googling tells me it isn't a flipping mirror anyway, but a half-silvered one (It's pretty quiet for an SLR, btw). Confusing.
I made the following observations:
I can see the LED indicators in the VF
The camera will not find focus
The camera sets a long shutter speed
Setting to Manual exposure and manual focus will let me activate the shutter, which sounds fine (I've not observed it yet, cause I put a film in to check something else first). The aperture closes and reopens well.
I cannot see any obstructions in the lens tube. This is a bridge style camera, so the lens is not removable.
I conclude from these that the optical path through the prism is OK, and the optical path at least as far as the aperture is fine.
I further conclude that the path is blocked from reaching the shutter blind, where the exposure reading would be taken, and (I think) the autofocus sensor would read.
So it is probably the mirror, in my opinion (I am very much prepared to be wrong). However, the biggest issue I could imagine with the mirror is breakage (no indication of that visually or audibly) or de-silvering, and both of these would be unlikely to block the view completely.
Now, my analytically-minded friends, please could you suggest what I should try next?
