Nikon EM

Put a Nikon EM next to an Olympus OM-10 on a shop counter and you are looking at the same fight from 1979. Two small, light, aperture-priority SLRs built to pull first-time buyers into a system before they knew they were committing to one. Olympus had the OM cult and a finder a hair brighter. Nikon had the F mount, and that turned out to be the whole argument. Buy the EM, outgrow it in two years, and every lens you bought still bolts onto an F3.

It is tiny for a Nikon. The rounded top plate sits low in one hand, and the body does exactly one thing: aperture-priority auto. You pick the aperture, the camera picks the speed, and that is the entire conversation. There is no manual mode. You get a mechanical 1/90 backup and Bulb if the battery dies, and that is it, so two button cells are not optional. The meter is center-weighted and honest in even light, with a needle in the finder that swings down the speed scale as you stop down. A beep warns you when the auto speed drops slow enough to risk camera shake, nudging you before a handheld frame turns to mush. In normal light, on a correctly exposed frame, it stays quiet. The finder is bright enough, with a split-prism and microprism collar that snap focus fast on a normal lens.

The shutter runs from a full second up to about 1/1000, flash syncs at 1/90, and it sounds light and quick rather than authoritative. This was the body Nikon launched the Series E lenses for, the cheaper plastic-barreled primes and zooms that let a student build a kit without remortgaging anything. A 50mm f/1.8 Series E on an EM is still one of the great cheap-fun combinations in 35mm, sharp and almost weightless.

The honest weakness is the lack of control. That center-weighted auto meter is easy to fool. Shoot a backlit portrait or a snowfield and the EM will average the bright stuff and bury your subject, with no manual mode to override it cleanly. The usual fix is the exposure-compensation backlight button, which only buys you a fixed two stops, blunt and inflexible. This is exactly where a handheld reading earns its place. Walk up, take an incident or spot reading off your subject with the Zone Light Meter app, place the shadows on the zone you actually want, then dial in compensation or stop down until the auto speed matches what the app told you. You stop arguing with the body's averaging and start telling it the answer.

Today the EM is the cheap door into Nikon glass. People cross-shop it against the OM-10 and the Pentax ME, and the deciding factor is almost always which lens mount you want to live inside. As a camera it is modest. As a delivery system for a 50mm f/1.8 and a roll of color negative on a Saturday, it is hard to beat for the money. Just check the light seals before you hand over cash, and watch the finder needle track as you change aperture to confirm the auto shutter actually shifts speed, because a dead EM is a paperweight with no manual fallback worth using.