Nikon F100

People called it the poor man's F5, and that undersells it. The F100 packs most of what made Nikon's late-1990s flagship matter into a body a third smaller and noticeably lighter, no integrated motor-drive grip draining a brick of batteries, and for most working photographers in 1999 that was the smarter buy. The metering brain is a step down from the F5's RGB sensor, but in the field you rarely feel the gap. It is the autofocus film Nikon a lot of shooters kept within reach even after they moved to digital, and the one a fair number of them still load when they want a roll to look like the day actually happened.

Pick one up and the build lands first. Magnesium top and bottom, a real grip molded for a hand, the damped heft that tells you nothing inside is going to rattle loose. The viewfinder is bright and shows about ninety-six percent of the frame on a clean matte screen with the AF brackets laid over it. Five autofocus points run off the Multi-CAM1300 module, fast and sure in daylight, and the in-body screw-drive motor whips older AF Nikkors into focus with a satisfying mechanical buzz. The shutter runs from 30 seconds to about 1/8000, flash sync at 1/250, and it sounds like a flagship: a tight, mechanical thunk with almost no aftershock.

The meter is the reason this body still sells. Nikon's 3D Color Matrix metering reads the scene across ten segments and folds in distance data from D-type lenses, and it is genuinely excellent, the kind of meter that nails backlit portraits and snow and stage light without you babysitting it. Center-weighted and spot sit a button away when you want to override. Run it in aperture priority and it mostly just gets out of the way. For the scenes where any averaging meter gets fooled, a tricky high-contrast interior or a face against a bright window, a spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app lets you place the shadows on the zone you actually want instead of trusting the camera to guess.

It loads film like a dream. Drop the cartridge, pull the leader to the mark, close the back, and it threads and advances to frame one on its own, then rewinds at the end. Around 4.5 frames a second on the internal motor, faster with the optional MB-15 grip and AA cells. Custom functions let you reshape how the dials and AF behave, and most are worth setting once and forgetting.

The honest weakness is the back. The F100 uses a plastic film-door hinge and latch that can crack with age or a hard knock, and a broken back means a repair that, on a bad day, costs more than the camera is worth. The electronics themselves hold up, but this is a fully battery-dependent body. No cells, no camera, full stop.

Today it sits in a sweet spot most film SLRs cannot touch. Cheaper and lighter than an F5, far more capable than an N80 or a manual FM, and it eats the same AF-D and AF-S glass your Nikon digital bodies already use. People cross-shop it against the F5 and the Canon EOS-3, and on value the F100 usually wins. If you want one autofocus film body and only one, this is it.