Nikon Nikkormat FTn

This is the Nikon you buy when you cannot afford a Nikon. For years that was the whole pitch, and it was a good one. The Nikkormat FTn was Nikon's idea of an enthusiast body that took the same F-mount lenses as the pro Nikon F, gave you a real coupled meter, and cost a fraction of the price. The trade was the F's removable prism and motor drive. What you kept was the glass, and with this system the glass was always the point.

Pick one up and the first thing you notice is the weight. It is dense in a way that modern cameras are not, all brass and steel, and the shutter is a vertical-travel metal Copal Square unit that goes off with a heavy mechanical clack rather than a click. Top speed is about 1/1000, flash sync at 1/125, faster than the cloth-shutter SLRs it competed with because the metal blades travel vertically across the short dimension of the frame. The shutter speed ring is the famous quirk: it lives concentric with the lens mount, not on the top plate, so you set the speed with your left fingertips right where they already are. People either adore that layout or never get used to it.

The viewfinder is bright and the focusing aid in the center snaps focus cleanly. Metering is the FTn part of the name. It is a center-weighted CdS match-needle system, and the clever bit is the meter coupling: you set the aperture ring to f/5.6, rack it down to the minimum opening and back to wide open, and the prong on the lens indexes its maximum aperture to the meter. Once you learn the little ritual it is fast. The needle reads against a notch on the right side of the finder, you turn aperture or speed until it centers, and you shoot. The shutter itself is fully mechanical, so it fires without a battery. Only the meter needs the cell powered.

That meter is also the honest weakness. It was built for mercury cells that no longer exist, so readings off a modern alkaline or silver replacement drift, and CdS cells as a technology are slow to recover after you point them at something bright. A 50-year-old meter is a 50-year-old meter. So I treat the body as the reliable half of the system and meter separately. An incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app sets the exposure, then I dial it onto the camera and trust the shutter to do its one job. It always does.

Today the FTn is a quiet bargain. It sits below the Nikon F and the F2 in price and cred, gets cross-shopped against the Pentax Spotmatic and the Canon FTb, and tends to win that fight on lens availability alone, because pre-AI Nikkors are everywhere and they are superb. Students still learn on these. Street shooters who want something tougher than a plastic SLR carry them without a second thought. Drop it and you are more worried about the floor than the camera. The only thing it really asks for is a working light source, and that part is easy to solve.