Nikon Nikkormat FT2

Most Nikkormats make you do battery math. The FT2 is the one that does not. When Nikon updated the FTn in 1975 the headline change was buried in the battery chamber: out went the 1.35-volt mercury cell that powered every earlier Nikkormat meter, and in came a common 1.5-volt silver-oxide cell, the SR44 or 357 type you can still buy at any counter. The meter was built around that 1.5 volts from the start, so the reading you get is the reading the camera intends. That single swap is the whole reason to pick an FT2 over an FT or FTn today. No adapter, no Wein cell, no recalibration, no workaround.

The body underneath is pure mid-seventies Nikon, which is to say dense brass and steel that you feel the moment you lift it. The shutter is the vertical-travel metal Copal Square, so the speed control is a ring concentric with the lens mount rather than a dial on the top plate. You set aperture and shutter with the same hand, eye at the finder, and after a roll or two you stop thinking about it. Speeds run from a full second to about 1/1000, and the blades fire with a heavy mechanical clack, not a click. Flash is the other real upgrade over the FTn. The FT2 added a standard ISO hot shoe and kept a threaded PC socket, X-syncing electronic flash at the top sync speed, which retired the FTn's cold shoe and dangling PC cable. M-sync for bulbs is still there if you ever need it.

Look through the finder and it is bright for its era, with a central split-image rangefinder ringed by a microprism collar that snaps into focus cleanly on fast glass. Metering is center-weighted CdS, the classic match-needle game on the right side of the frame. Center the needle and you are exposed. It is plenty good for slide film in even light.

The honest weakness is the meter, not the body. A CdS cell is slow to recover after you point it at something bright, and like every averaging meter it reads a bright sky and leaves a backlit subject in mud. For a high-contrast street scene or a backlit portrait, an incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app is what I trust instead. Place the shadows where you want them, dial the result onto the aperture ring and shutter collar, and the body never argues, because the shutter is fully mechanical and fires without a cell.

That mechanical core is why these stay in service. People buy the FT2 as a first real film camera or as a tough mount for an F-mount lens collection. It cross-shops against the Pentax Spotmatic and the Canon FTb, and the deep, cheap supply of pre-AI Nikkors usually settles it. Fresh seals, a silver-oxide cell, done.