Nikon FM2n

A photojournalist in a press scrum in 1989 has cold hands, a dead battery, and a deadline, and the FM2n keeps firing anyway. That is the whole pitch. Every speed on this camera works with no battery in it. The cell powers the meter and nothing else, so when the lithium dies you lose the three LEDs in the finder and keep the entire shutter, 1s through the top of the dial, sync and all. Mechanical cameras feel like a romance until you are the one in the rain, and then they feel like insurance.

The shutter is the headline. Nikon went to a honeycomb-pattern metal curtain that travels vertically, and it gets you a top speed up near 1/4000 with flash sync at 1/250, which was unusual for a mechanical body and still useful. You can shoot fast glass wide open in daylight without a stack of neutral-density filters. The sound is a flat metallic snap, quick and unsentimental, nothing like the soft clack of an old Nikkormat. Wind-on is short-throw and crisp. The body is brass and aluminum and feels like it was machined rather than molded, which it more or less was.

In the finder you get a split-image center collar ringed by a microprism, ground glass around that, and roughly 93 percent coverage. It is bright and plain. Focusing is fast in good light and gets fiddly in dim corners, the usual split-prism story where the patch blacks out at small apertures with slow lenses. The meter is center-weighted through a silicon cell, reported by a simple plus, circle, minus LED stack on the right. Match the circle and go. It is not a sophisticated meter and it does not pretend to be, but it weights about sixty percent of the reading to the central circle, so point that part at what matters and it reads honestly once you learn where it is looking.

This was the camera a lot of working shooters carried as the backup that quietly became the main body, and the one a generation of students learned manual exposure on because it forces you to set both dials yourself. It anchors the same Nikon F mount that runs from prewar glass to modern lenses, so a beginner can start with a 50mm f/1.8 for almost nothing and never outgrow the lens shelf. Today it trades for real money, cross-shopped against the Olympus OM and the Pentax MX, and people pay because the things that break on electronic cameras are not present here to break.

The honest weakness is that the meter is the part that ages. The cell stays accurate for decades, but it is the one piece that depends on a battery and on foam light seals that crumble, and a fogged finder or sticky seals mean a CLA that costs more than the camera did new. When the meter is what finally gives out, an incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app is how you place exposure, because the shutter underneath it will outlive all of us. Set the dials by hand, trust the curtains, and the FM2n does the one job it was built for without asking for anything.