Nikon FE10

Pick one up and the first thing you notice is how little there is to notice. The FE10 is light, almost suspiciously so, and the film advance lever has a thin, plasticky travel that anyone who came off an FM2 will feel in the first frame. This is the cheap one. Nikon farmed the FE10 and its FM10 sibling out to Cosina, built on the Cosina C2/C3 platform, sold it mostly into emerging markets and school programs through the late 1990s and into the 2000s, and never pretended it was anything but an entry door into the F mount.

What that buys you is real, though. It takes Nikon F glass, which means every AI and AI-S lens ever made, plus a heap of newer AF primes you can run in manual focus. The viewfinder is a plain ground glass with a split-image center and a microprism collar, bright enough in daylight and honest about what is sharp. Down the right edge runs a center-weighted TTL meter that reads out on a column of LEDs, lighting the recommended speed in aperture-priority and the selected speed in manual. No needles to balance, just a lit number. Plain and quick.

The shutter is where the cost-cutting actually hides, and it is not where the brochure photos suggest. It is a vertical metal focal-plane unit, a Cosina assembly rather than the Nikon-designed mechanism in the FM2 it gets compared to, so the difference is not just the blades. It is electronic versus mechanical. The electronic FE10 sounds softer, a flatter clack instead of the FM2's crisp snap, and that has a real consequence: the shutter is fully electronic, so the camera will not fire at all without batteries. There is no mechanical fallback speed. Two LR44 or SR44 cells (or a single CR-1/3N) run the meter, the auto mode, and every shutter speed from 8 seconds up to about 1/2000, flash sync at 1/120. Let the cells die and you are holding a paperweight. Loading is the classic Nikon drill: hinge the back, drop the cartridge, tug the leader to the orange index, two strokes and you are shooting.

Aperture-priority is where most people leave it. You set the f-stop, the body picks the time, and for snapshots in even light that is the whole transaction. The catch is the same catch every averaging meter has. Point it at a backlit face or a snow scene and the LED will lie to you, closing down to protect a bright background and burying your subject. This is the one place to slow down. Read the shadow you care about with the Zone Light Meter app, decide where it should fall, and dial the FE10 to that by hand instead of trusting the center-weighted average. The body has manual mode for exactly this reason.

The honest weakness is the build, and the battery dependence that comes with it. The top and bottom plates are polycarbonate, the lens mount feels less planted than a pro Nikon, and a hard knock will tell. People who want a tank buy an FM2 and pay triple for it. People who want a clean, light, fully capable F-mount body that gets out of the way buy this, often for the price of a couple rolls and a sandwich. As a first real camera, or a beater you toss in a bag and do not baby, it is hard to argue with. Keep fresh cells in it and a spare in the bag, mind the seals, and it will outlast its reputation.