Nikon F-601 (N6006)

Less than a roll of medium format buys you a Nikon that meters like the pro bodies and mounts a deep run of Nikon AF glass. The F-601 sat in the dead zone between the cheap entry cameras and the F4, and for years it got ignored. Then people loaded one and discovered it does real matrix metering, runs the screw-drive and AF-D Nikkor lenses, and costs almost nothing. There is a reason these are cheap, and you should know it before you buy.

Hold it and you feel the early-90s polycarbonate, but the build is more serious than the plastic suggests. The pentaprism finder is bright and shows a clean view with a focus-confirm dot at the bottom, no clutter. Autofocus is single-point, center of the frame, and by modern standards it hunts in dim light, but in daylight it locks fast enough for street and family work. The command dial falls under your thumb. There is a small pop-up flash on top, genuinely handy for fill, and the body syncs at 1/120, fast enough to hold down a bright background without much fuss. The shutter is electronic, focal-plane, and runs from a long 30 seconds up to about 1/2000, with a quiet, slightly muffled clack that will not announce you across a room.

The meter is the reason to own one. Nikon put real matrix metering in here, the segmented evaluative system that reads the whole frame and nails exposure far more often than the averaging meters in cheaper bodies. You also get center-weighted and a true spot meter when you want to place a specific tone yourself. Program, aperture-priority, shutter-priority, and full manual are all on the dial. Film loading is motorized: drop the cassette, pull the leader to the mark, close the back, and it advances on its own. DX coding sets the ISO automatically.

Now the part that kills these cameras. The F-601 leans on an LCD data panel and electronics that age badly. Many have a fading or bleeding top display, and the back-cover light seals turn to goo. A body that reads dead on the shelf is often just starving for a fresh 6V CR-P2 (DL-223A) lithium cell, but a genuinely failed LCD or a corroded contact is not worth repairing. Buy one that has been tested with film, not one sold "as found."

It existed because Nikon needed a capable enthusiast autofocus camera in 1990 that was not the expensive F4, and it quietly did that job until 1994. Today it is a near-throwaway price, often bundled with a kit zoom, and people cross-shop it against the Canon EOS bodies of the same era. The argument for the Nikon is the F mount: decades of glass, including AF-D primes that work fully on this body, on a camera that costs almost nothing.

One practical note. The matrix meter is good, but it still averages toward the middle in a hard backlit scene, so a bright window behind a face will fool it. For those frames, take an incident or spot reading with the Zone Light Meter app, decide which zone you want the shadows to land on, and dial that in with the camera in manual. Let the body handle ordinary daylight; you only step in when the light gets mean.