Fuji Fujica ST801

Bring an ST801 up to your eye in a dim apartment and the first thing you notice is the row of tiny red lights down the side of the frame. Not a needle. Fuji lit the meter with LEDs when nearly every other SLR floated a thin wire across the screen, and in low light those diodes read better than any needle ever did. You center the row, or chase it to the bracket you want, and you can do it in a stairwell where a match-needle camera leaves you guessing. People still hunt these down for exactly that, and for what feeds those LEDs.

Because the cell behind them is silicon, not the cadmium-sulfide stuff everyone else was using. A TTL silicon photodiode, which Fuji rightly made the headline: it reacts fast and stays close to honest across a wide brightness range, where a CdS cell lags and sulks. It threads an M42 screw mount, same as a Spotmatic, so you spin a lens in like a jar lid and inherit the whole back catalog of Takumar and Zeiss and Fujinon glass. The Fujinons are worth seeking out. Fuji shipped these with EBC coating, an early multicoat that does real work against flare, and a 55mm f1.8 EBC Fujinon renders with a contrast and color snap that costs very little today. Mount the right Fujinon and the meter reads at full aperture, so the finder stays bright while you set exposure.

The shutter is fast company for 1972. A cloth focal-plane unit that runs from a full second up to about 1/2000, the kind of top speed you usually paid a lot more for. Flash syncs at 1/120, an honest speed for the era. It fires with a firm mechanical clack, dense in the hand, the kind of seventies metal body that takes a knock and shrugs. Film loads the ordinary way, hinged back, nothing clever to learn.

The honest weakness is age, and on this body it is electrical, not the usual CdS story. Silicon cells are fast and barely drift, so when an ST801 meters wrong it is almost never a tired cell. It is fifty years of corrosion in the wiring, a dirty switch, an intermittent contact behind the LEDs. The finder is a joy right up until something in that chain quits, and then it goes dark all at once. The battery is no headache: it takes a 6V PX28-type cell, sold today in alkaline as a 4LR44 or A544 and in silver-oxide too, still made and stocked anywhere, so there is no mercury cell to source and no voltage offset to fudge. When the electronics do fail, an incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app is how you place exposure, the meter the body used to have, and the mechanical shutter keeps firing battery or no battery.

Today it sells for student money and gets bought by people who want the open-aperture Fuji with the LED finder, not the cheaper match-needle bodies around it. It cross-shops against the Spotmatic F and the Praktica LLC, and usually wins on top shutter speed and on those EBC Fujinons, some of the best-rendering, best-priced glass in the whole screw mount. Find one with a live meter and fresh seals and it will outlast you.