Fuji Fujica ST901

Put an ST901 next to a Pentax Spotmatic of the same year and the screw-mount crowd will tell you the Pentax is the safer buy. They are right about the lenses and wrong about the camera. The Spotmatic makes you stop down to meter and tops out around 1/1000. The Fujica reads the scene wide open, runs out near 1/2000, and adds an aperture-priority auto mode on top of an M42 mount. Fuji did that by grafting its own coupling onto the universal screw thread, so the meter could read at full aperture instead of forcing you into the stop-down dance. The screw mount was never designed for any of this, and Fuji made it work anyway.

You set the aperture, the camera picks the shutter speed, and it times that speed electronically rather than with a clockwork escapement. The auto range runs all the way out to a full 20 seconds, which is genuinely unusual on a 1970s SLR and means long night exposures without a stopwatch in your hand. Those long speeds belong to the auto mode, though. The manual side is a limited mechanical range, not the same span. The viewfinder is the clever part. Instead of a swinging needle, the ST901 shows the chosen speed as a glowing red LED readout in the finder, an early example of a digital display where most rivals still used a moving pointer. In a dark room you can actually read what it decided. The split-image aid sits in a finder that is reasonably bright for the era, and the body carries the weight of metal without feeling like a brick.

Loading is ordinary, the film advance is smooth, and the silicon-cell metering through the open lens is the whole reason to own this instead of a Spotmatic. The catch is buried in that same sentence. The meter and the long electronically timed speeds do not run without batteries, so a dead cell means no auto mode and no metering. You are not fully stranded, because the mechanical 1/60 to 1/1000 range plus Bulb still fires with no power, but you lose everything that makes this camera special. Fifty years later that matters, because the original mercury cells are long gone and the electronics inside an ST901 are the part most likely to have quietly failed in a drawer. Finding one that still meters and fires cleanly on auto takes some luck.

So who carried it? Enthusiasts who wanted the M42 lens world, all those Takumars and Super-Multi-Coateds and the endless cheap glass, but were tired of stopping down to check every reading. It was Fuji arguing that the screw mount still had life in it, right before the industry moved to bayonet mounts a couple of years later. That timing is why the ST901 ended up a footnote instead of a classic. It bet on a mount the rest of the business was already walking away from.

Now it sits underpriced. People cross-shop it against the Spotmatic and usually reach for the Pentax out of habit, which keeps ST901 prices low for a body that does more. Buy it for the auto mode and the long exposures. Skip it if you need a camera whose best features you can keep alive forever with a screwdriver, because the auto mode and the meter ride on aging electronics, even though the mechanical speeds will outlive the battery. One practical note for the long end of that shutter range. When you are placing a backlit or high-contrast scene, take a reading with the Zone Light Meter app and set your shadows where you want them, rather than letting the averaging cell pull a bright sky into mud. The auto mode is good for its decade. It is not a substitute for deciding the exposure yourself.