OM System Teases New Pen Series Camera Launch on September 9

OM System has published a short teaser for a new camera coming on September 9, and given that it quickly goes through the heritage and evolution of the Pen series, it very likely points to a new Pen camera, or at the very least its spiritual successor.

The video has been posted across OM System Japan’s social networks and is a quick 17-second high-level overview of where the Pen system, which started in 1959 with the original Pen half-frame camera, before zooming ahead to a silhouetted 2026 iteration.

The original Pen shown at the start of that teaser was the first half-frame film camera produced in Japan and renowned for its extremely small size. For the next several decades, Olympus produced a huge number of Pen cameras, including the Pen S series, D series, EE series, Wide (or W series), EM, F, FT, and FV cameras.

Over the years, the Pen name continued forward into the digital age with the Digital Pen released in 2009, which is the second camera shown in OM System’s latest teaser. Multiple digital Pen series cameras were released over the ensuing decade, with perhaps the most well-known Pen camera of the modern era being the digital Pen F from 2016. It is beloved mainly for its compact size and excellent design, even today.

OM System carried on the Pen lines after it was spun off from Olympus, but the most recent Pen camera produced, the E-P7, was never released in the US. If OM System is again hyping up the Pen series, it would be very strange for the next camera to have a limited release as the E-P7 did.

Compact camera enthusiasts have been basically begging OM System to release something in the Pen line for years, and in March, the company seemed to finally be listening.

“I’d like to ask you for some feedback about the Pen,” company executives told PetaPixel, unprompted, at the CP+ show in Japan. “Maybe we are thinking of an opportunity for that in development.”

That appears not to have been for nothing, as OM System is prepared to announce something related to the Pen line on September 9.