VERDICT
Beautiful, durable, reliable. This typewriter would be almost perfect if it didn't suffer from one major flaw: the carriage shift. If this doesn't bother you, then you can't go wrong getting yourself one of these classic Olympia machines. SPECIFICATIONS
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Think of an Olympia typewriter and you think of the classic qualities associated with German engineering: quality, durability, precision. An Olympia might not have been the prettiest typewriter you could buy (the SG1 and SM2/3/4 excepted), but it was a machine you could enjoy and depend on for the rest of your life. From 1903 until its demise in the early 1990s, Olympia and its predecessor iterations manufactured millions of machines for its home market and the world. After the end of World War II, its success with its ultraportable SF, portable SM, and standard SG typewriters was so great that one in two typewriters made in Germany in the early 1960s was an Olympia. By the early 1970s, it had become one of the three largest typewriter manufacturers in the world. But the company entered a nosedive in the late 1970s and never recovered. The computer was making the typewriter obsolete and Olympia never found its footing in the new silicon age. After more than a dozen years of losses and factory closures, Olympia's owners gave up hope and on December 31, 1992 the primary factory in the north-western German city of Wilhelmshaven shut its doors for the last time. |