Nikon FG

Pentax had the ME Super, and Nikon had no compact body with a real program mode to answer it until the FG. That was the whole point of this camera. Through the back half of the seventies the small-SLR fight belonged to Pentax and Olympus, and Nikon's lineup felt like a brick by comparison. The FG arrived in 1982 as the body that finally let a Nikon F-mount lens live in a jacket pocket, and it did one thing the little Pentax could not: a real program mode that picked both aperture and shutter for you. For 1982, on a camera this size, that mattered.

In the hand it is almost startlingly light. Plastic top and bottom plates over a metal core, a body you forget you are carrying after an hour. The shutter is a vertical focal-plane unit that runs from a full second up to about 1/1000, with flash sync at 1/90, and it has the quiet, slightly plasticky clack that all these early-eighties compacts share. None of the authority of an FM. Film loads the ordinary Nikon way, the finder is bright enough with a standard split-prism and microprism collar, and the meter readout sits down the right side as a column of LEDs rather than a swinging needle. Three modes total: program, aperture priority, and full manual.

The metering is center-weighted and genuinely competent for what it is, but it is averaging at heart, and it gets fooled by the scenes that fool every camera of this class. Snow, a backlit portrait, a bright window behind your subject. This is exactly where a handheld reading earns its keep: take a spot or incident reading off your subject with the Zone Light Meter app, decide which zone the shadows belong on, then dial that into manual or nudge the exposure compensation instead of letting the body average the whole frame to gray. The FG will happily expose for the window and leave a face in silhouette if you let it.

The honest weakness is that the FG leans hard on its batteries and its electronics for everything past the basics. It is not the kind of body you can fully run off feel when the cells die. The FG keeps a mechanical M90 speed (1/90s) plus Bulb that fire without a battery, so a dead pair of LR44s drops you to one shutter speed rather than killing the camera outright. Every other speed is electronic, though, so in practice you still want fresh cells in your bag. The plastic build also means the FG does not age as gracefully as its all-metal siblings; tired light seals and the occasional flaky meter circuit are common on bodies that have sat in a drawer for forty years.

Today it is a quiet bargain. It gets cross-shopped against the FM and FE, and it usually loses on feel and resale, which is precisely why it stays cheap. People who want the heirloom Nikon buy the FM. People who want a feathercake travel body that takes every manual Nikkor ever made, and who do not mind feeding it batteries, buy the FG and pocket the savings. As a first roll-shooting SLR or a grab-and-go second body, it is one of the most underrated cameras Nikon ever made.