Nikon FA

Split the frame into five zones, feed the readings to a tiny onboard computer, and let the camera work out that it is looking at a bright sky over a dark subject and correct on its own. In 1983 that was a strange thing for a meter to do. Nikon built it into the FA and called it Automatic Multi-Pattern, the first five-segment matrix meter in a production camera, and it is the direct ancestor of the evaluative metering in nearly every digital camera made since. The whole point was to stop one center-weighted average from getting wrecked by a snowfield or a backlit window. Now that pattern reading is the default in everything that shoots automatically, and the FA is where it started.

It is a chunky body, denser than it looks, sitting between the FE2 it shares a chassis with and the pro F3 above it. What sets it apart is that it does everything. Programmed auto, shutter priority, aperture priority, and full manual all live on one body, which made the FA Nikon's first to offer the whole spread. The shutter is a vertical-travel metal blade design, electronically timed, running from a full second up to about 1/4000 and syncing flash at 1/250. That sync was fast for a focal-plane curtain then and is still useful for daylight fill now. The finder is bright, with a split-image center and a microprism collar, and focus snaps on fast glass.

It anchors the Nikon F mount, so AI and AI-S lenses meter natively, and the matrix computer actually wants AI-S glass to feed it the aperture data it needs to work. That is decades of optics waiting on used shelves, the same argument that sells every manual Nikon. Hand the body a 50mm f/1.4, shoot, and in the modes that use the matrix meter the camera quietly does the math you would otherwise carry in your head.

The honest weakness is the one the spec sheet hides. The FA crammed a four-bit microprocessor into a 1983 body, and the early electronics earned it a reputation for being unreliable, a word Nikon shooters did not throw around lightly. Time proved the bodies mechanically tough, but the circuitry is the thing that goes, and a sick FA is harder to revive than a simpler FE2. Battery dependence is part of the same deal. Two dead cells drop you to one mechanical speed marked M250 plus Bulb, nothing in between, so spares are not optional.

For the scene the matrix meter cannot save, stop trusting the average. A subject hard against a window, or a stage lit from one side, will still fool a five-zone pattern the way it fools any reflected meter. Take an incident or spot reading off the subject with the Zone Light Meter app, place your shadows on the zone you actually want, and set the FA in manual to match instead of letting the program guess. Today the FA sits a notch above the FE2 in price because of what it started, and people cross-shop the two constantly. Buy the FE2 for bulletproof simplicity. Buy the FA if you want to hold the camera that taught everything else how to read light.