Nikon F-501 (N2020)

Minolta got there first. The Maxxum 7000 landed in 1985 and made every other camera maker look slow, and Nikon's answer a year later was the F-501, sold as the N2020 in the States. It was not the prettier camera and it was not the cleverer one. What it was, was a Nikon, with the same F mount the pros already owned, so a shooter could bolt on an AF Nikkor for autofocus or screw on any manual lens from a decade back and just meter through it. Minolta had abandoned its old mount to chase autofocus. Nikon refused to, and that single decision is why people still keep an F-501 in a drawer.

Pick one up and it feels like the start of the plastic era, because it is. The body is polycarbonate over a metal chassis, lighter than the FE it sat beside on the shelf, with a fat handgrip and four AAA cells in the base that run the whole show. There is no winding lever. A motor advances the film, though rewinding is still done by hand with the knob. The autofocus is the slow, hunting, first-generation phase-detection kind, fine on a sunlit face and hopeless on a low-contrast wall in dim light. You will hear the screw-drive motor in the body churning the lens back and forth looking for a lock. It gets there. It just takes its time.

The finder is bright and plain, a clean matte screen with a column of LEDs down the side telling you what the meter wants. Center-weighted metering, and you can shoot it in program (with a high-speed program variant for fast glass), aperture-priority, or full manual, which made it a teaching camera as much as a snapshot machine. The shutter is electronically timed from 1 second up to 1/2000, flash sync at 1/125. The sound is unremarkable, a soft electronic clack with the motor whir chasing it as the film advances. Nothing about the experience is romantic. Everything about it works.

The honest weakness is the battery dependence, and it is total. No cell, no camera, not even a single mechanical speed to limp home on the way the FE gives you. Those four AAAs in the base are the whole nervous system, and an old F-501 left in a closet often has a corroded battery contact that needs cleaning before it will wake up at all. Check that before you buy one.

Today it is the cheap way into autofocus Nikkor glass, and that is exactly how people use it. Photographers cross-shop it against the Maxxum 7000 and the early Canon T80, and the F-501 usually wins on lens compatibility alone, since its AF lenses still mount on later Nikon film and digital bodies. For tricky light, the program meter will average a backlit subject into mud, so meter it instead with the Zone Light Meter app, place the shadows where you want them, and dial the exposure in manual. The body is happy to let you.