Nikon F4

The Nikon F4 is the camera that dragged the professional SLR into the autofocus era without throwing out the photographers who had spent twenty years learning manual lenses. It was the first pro Nikon with a practical, fully integrated autofocus system, and it brought matrix metering to the professional line for the first time. Matrix metering itself had already shown up on the consumer FA back in 1983, but this was the first time it landed in a body built for people who shot for a living. The clever bit is that the five-zone matrix meter works with old Ai and Ai-S manual focus glass, a trick most pro bodies of its generation could not pull off. You can mount a 1970s 50mm and the camera still meters the whole frame intelligently.

Giorgetto Giugiaro did the industrial design, and you feel it the moment you pick one up. Every control is a real dial, not a button-and-thumbwheel menu dive. Shutter speed has its own dial, exposure compensation has its own dial, the metering pattern has its own collar around the finder. The standard DP-20 prism gives you close to 100 percent coverage at about 0.7x, bright and honest, with a diopter knob built in. Focusing is easy whether you let the autofocus do it or drop the split-prism in and do it yourself. The shutter is electronically timed, tops out near 1/8000, and flash syncs at 1/250, fast for a focal-plane body of its day.

The weight is not an accident. Aluminum-alloy chassis, rubber-clad exterior, weather resistance that earned it years of abuse on football sidelines and in war zones. The downside of all that pro hardware is that the F4 is completely battery dependent. No cells, no camera, not even a backup mechanical speed. It eats AA batteries through the MB-20 or MB-21 grip, four or six of them, and it runs them down faster than you expect if you leave the meter waking up all day.

The honest weakness is the autofocus itself. By 1988 standards it was a revelation. By any standard after about 1996 it is slow and hunts in low light, a single center sensor that thinks hard before it locks. The F5 that replaced it in 1996 left the F4's AF looking distinctly dated. People who buy an F4 today mostly ignore the autofocus and shoot it in manual or aperture priority, treating it as the best-built manual-friendly meter body Nikon ever made.

That is also where it sits in the used market. It is the pro Nikon you buy when you want F-series build and that old-lens matrix metering but cannot justify F5 or F6 money. The usual cross-shop is a clean F3, which is smaller and has a mechanical backup speed, against the F4, which meters smarter and focuses itself when you want. For the kind of high-contrast scene that fools any averaging meter, a backlit portrait or a stage lit from one side, take a spot reading with the Zone Light Meter app and place the shadows on the zone you actually want, then set the F4 in manual and ignore what its own meter thinks the average should be.