Nikon F-401 (N4004)

Nikon built this one for people who had never owned a Nikon. By 1987 the company had watched Minolta clean up with the autofocus Maxxum, and the pro-grade F-501 sold mostly to enthusiasts who already knew the system. The F-401, sold as the N4004 in the States, was the answer for the camera-shop wall: a friendly autofocus SLR with a real Nikon F mount, aimed squarely at the family buyer and the student who wanted into the brand without buying a brick. It was the first Nikon with a built-in flash, and among the first to move aperture control onto a body thumbwheel instead of the lens aperture ring.

Pick one up and the build tells you the price point immediately. Light, rounded plastic, nothing like the metal bodies sitting above it on the shelf. The top deck has no shutter dial. You drive everything from a little lever and a mode switch: program, aperture-priority, shutter-priority, and a couple of subject programs. The viewfinder is decent for the class, bright enough, with a focus-confirm dot and a centered AF bracket. The autofocus is early-generation, slow and prone to hunting in low light or low contrast. That grinding motor sound is not a missing part, though. The F-401 has an in-body screw-drive AF motor fed by the AM200 phase-detection module, the same body-mounted approach Nikon used across its AF line, unlike the in-lens motors Minolta and Canon went with. It is just first-try autofocus doing first-try things.

The metering is smarter than the body's looks suggest. In the auto and program modes it reads a multi-segment triple-sensor pattern; switch to manual and it falls back to a center-weighted cell. Aperture-priority is where the F-401 shines for everyday work. The shutter runs from long exposures down low up to about 1/1000, with flash sync at 1/120, and film loading is the modern automatic kind: lay the leader to the mark, close the back, and it spools. No mirror lockup. No depth-of-field preview at all.

Then there is the appetite for batteries. The F-401 runs on four AA cells, an odd amount for a camera this size, and without them it does absolutely nothing. No mechanical backup speed, no metering, dead in the bag. Plenty of these have also gone soft in the rubber and sticky in the back-door foam, so budget a cheap re-seal.

Today it sells for next to nothing. That is exactly why people still grab one: it is the cheapest legitimate door into the Nikon F mount, and any manual or AF Nikkor you find will mount and meter. People cross-shop it against the Canon EOS 650 and the Minolta Maxxum 7000, and honestly those two autofocus better, but the F-401 keeps you in Nikon glass. For a high-contrast backlit scene in manual, where that center-weighted cell wants to dump the background and blow out your subject, take an incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app and place your shadows where you want them, then set the aperture and let aperture-priority finish the job. Keep four fresh cells with you and it makes a forgiving first SLR.