Nikon FM10

Pick one up and the first thing you notice is what it does not weigh. The FM10 has a polycarbonate top and bottom that feel hollow next to the all-metal FM2 it borrows its name from, and the film advance lever moves with a slightly gritty, plasticky stroke that disappoints anyone expecting the buttery FM2 throw. That mismatch is the whole story of this camera. It wears Nikon on the prism but Cosina built it in Japan, the same Cosina that quietly made bodies for half the industry. People who know that fact tend to either dismiss the FM10 on sight or buy three of them.

Once you stop comparing it to its older relatives, it works fine. The viewfinder is reasonably bright with a split-image rangefinder ringed by a microprism collar, so focusing the kit 35-70mm zoom is quick and unfussy. Down the left side of the finder sit three little lights fed by a 60/40 center-weighted silicon-photodiode meter: a red plus on top, a green dot in the middle, a red minus below. You turn the aperture ring or the shutter dial until only the green center light glows, and that is your exposure. No number, no needle, just a go signal. It is a flat go/no-go readout rather than anything analog, but it is fast in the eye and it taught plenty of beginners how aperture and shutter trade against each other without ever showing them a scale.

The shutter is a vertical-travel focal-plane unit running from a full second to about 1/2000, with flash sync near 1/125. It is a fully mechanical, mechanically-timed shutter, which is why the body fires without batteries at all: the meter needs the two LR44 cells, the shutter does not. Loading is the standard Nikon drill, drop the leader to the take-up index, fire and advance twice, watch the rewind knob turn. Build aside, it is a real F-mount Nikon, so the entire universe of manual Nikkor glass mounts and meters correctly, which is the actual reason to own one.

That polycarbonate shell is also the honest weakness. The FM10 does not feel like it will survive being dropped on stone the way an FM2 shrugs it off, and the kit zoom that ships with most of them is soft and slow at f/3.5-4.8. Put a 50mm f/1.8 AI-S on the front and the camera transforms. People cross-shop it against the Pentax K1000 and the Canon AE-1, and on a desk the K1000 wins on toughness while the FM10 wins on lens access. Today it sits in the cheap-mechanical-Nikon bracket, the camera you hand a student or pack for a trip where you would rather not risk the good body.

The meter, for what it is, can be fooled by the things every center-weighted meter is fooled by. Backlit portraits, snow, a bright window behind your subject. For those, take an incident or spot reading off the Zone Light Meter app and place your shadows where you want them, then set the FM10 by hand and ignore the green light. The camera will happily expose exactly what you tell it to, which is the entire point of a manual body.