Nikon Nikkormat FT

It is a brick. The first time you pick up a Nikkormat FT you brace for it, because the weight tells you before anything else that this is metal all the way through. Nikon built it in 1965 for the photographer who wanted into the F system without paying for the F. The Nikon F was the professional flagship and it cost accordingly. The Nikkormat was the cheaper door into the same glass. Same F mount, same lenses, but with the meter built into the body instead of clipped onto a removable prism. For a few years in the mid sixties this was how a serious amateur bought into Nikon optics.

The handling has one genuine quirk. Nikon put the shutter-speed control concentric with the lens mount, a ring you turn with your fingertips while your eye stays on the finder, rather than the top-deck dial everyone else used. It throws you at first and then you stop thinking about it. The focal-plane shutter is the vertical-travel Copal Square, metal-bladed, running from a full second to about 1/1000 with flash sync at 1/120. Mechanical and stubborn in the good sense.

The meter is a CdS match-needle system, center-weighted, read through the finder by lining a needle against a marker. It works. It is not a spot meter and never claimed to be. The finder is bright for its age, with a central microprism spot that breaks up an out-of-focus subject so you can snap it in. Loading is plain back-door 35mm, no surprises. The CdS cell needs a battery, but the shutter and every mechanical function runs without one, so a dead cell costs you metering, not the camera.

That dead-cell scenario is the honest weakness, and it is common now on the FT and FTn. These bodies were built for 1.35V mercury cells that you can no longer buy, so the meter on an untouched one often reads off, or the CdS cell has simply aged into uselessness after sixty years. (The later FT2 and FT3 moved to other cells, so this caveat is really an early-Nikkormat problem.) You can have it recalibrated, or you can do what plenty of FT shooters do and ignore the needle. An incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app is the cleaner answer. It hands back the accurate meter the body has lost, while the indestructible mechanical shutter underneath keeps doing its job.

Today the FT and its descendants, the FTn, the FT2, the FT3, are among the cheapest reliable ways into a Nikon F-mount body. People cross-shop them against the Pentax Spotmatic and the Canon FTb, and the deciding factor is usually the lenses you already own or want. The Nikkormat is the heaviest of the three and feels the least delicate. You load it, you carry it all day, and it shrugs off the kind of handling that would worry you on a lighter body. That is most of the reason people still reach for it.