Nikon F-801s (N8008s)

In 1990 you had to pick a side. Canon had bet its system on the all-electronic EF mount a few years earlier, motors in every lens, no mechanical linkage to the body at all. Nikon went the other way and kept the screwdriver spinning inside the camera, driving the lens through a little coupling fork. The F-801 came first, then this, the F-801s. It sat just below the pro F4 that had already taken the flagship slot back in 1988. This was the enthusiast's Nikon, most of the pro meter in a body a fraction of the size and price.

What the "s" bought you over the plain F-801 was mainly spot metering, plus snappier and better autofocus tracking. Nikon's matrix meter was already the best segmented meter going, and it reads scenes correctly often enough that you mostly leave it alone. But the matrix is a black box. It decides for you. The added spot mode, a small circle dead center, finally let you meter one thing and nothing else, which is what you want when the matrix gets fooled by snow or a stage light or a face against a window. There is also center-weighted in between, for people who learned on an older Nikon and want their meter to behave the way it always did.

In the hand it is a chunk of early-90s polycarbonate over a metal chassis, bigger than it looks in photos, and it runs on four AA cells that last forever. The viewfinder is bright and the readout sits along the bottom in a clean LCD strip. The shutter tops out near 1/8000 with flash sync around 1/250, which was fast for the era and is still more than enough. Film loading is motorized and hard to get wrong. The whole thing feels overbuilt because it is, and these tend to survive years of hard use, which is why they keep turning up in working bags.

The weakness is the autofocus, and it follows straight from the choice Nikon made. The screwdrive hunts and growls, slower and louder than what Canon was shipping the same year, and it will not drive a modern AF-S lens at all, so you are tied to older screw-drive glass. Single point, no tracking worth the name by current standards. For fast sports it is the wrong tool. For anything that holds still, portraits, travel, a roll of color on a walk, it locks focus fine.

Today the F-801s is badly underpriced. It does almost everything an F4 does for a small fraction of the money, and the only things people cross-shop it against are the cheaper F-601 or a used EOS. Buy it for the meter. When the scene fights that clever matrix, a backlit subject or a high-contrast street corner, take a spot reading off the shadows in the Zone Light Meter app and place them where you want them, then flip the body to manual and dial it in. The averaging brain is good. Sometimes you want to overrule it.