Nikon Nikonos V

Take any other 35mm camera forty feet down and you are really shooting a plastic housing the size of a lunchbox, with the actual camera sealed somewhere inside it. The Nikonos V skips all of that. The o-rings are on the body itself. You hand it over the side of the boat, jump in after it, and shoot. That single fact is why this thing existed and why divers still pay for one in 2026.

It is the last and most refined of Nikon's amphibious line, made from 1984 to 2001, and the V is the one to own because it finally added a meter. A through-the-lens, center-weighted cell drives aperture-priority auto, despite the camera not being a reflex. A column of LEDs runs down the side of the finder showing the shutter speed the camera picked. You set the f-stop on the lens, the body finds the speed stepless between 1/30 and about 1/1000, and flash syncs at 1/90. In very dim water the auto range bottoms out at 1/30, and when there is not enough light for a clean exposure the finder lights an under-exposure arrow to warn you, your cue to switch to manual Bulb if you want to hold the shutter open, so watch your shadows when the light gets thin. Underwater that automation earns its keep, because the light falls off fast as you descend and your hands are too cold for fiddling.

What it is not is an SLR. You do not see through the lens to frame. You compose through a separate optical finder and you focus by scale, guessing the distance and setting it on the lens barrel, which sounds primitive until you realize that underwater everything is close and the small apertures you shoot hand you depth of field to spare. The standard lens is the 35mm f/2.5, and the 15mm is the wide-angle that wreck and reef shooters covet for the way it swallows a whole hull in one frame. On land the body works fine too. People who hike in rain or shoot on beaches buy them as a body that shrugs off sand and spray where a normal camera would choke.

The honest weakness is the o-rings. They are the whole waterproof promise, and they demand religious maintenance. Grease them, inspect them for a single grain of grit, replace them on schedule. Neglect one and you flood the camera on the dive that kills it. The other catch is the electronics. The V leans on its battery and meter circuit, and dead Nikonos V bodies usually died from corrosion or a fried meter, not mechanical failure. A working one is increasingly a lucky find.

Topside, the meter handles open water well enough, but the moment you point it at a bright sky over a dark shoreline it gets fooled like any center-weighted meter. For those high-contrast scenes, take an incident or spot reading with the Zone Light Meter app and place your shadows where you actually want them, then set the aperture and let the body's auto speed follow. It is a clean way to override a center-weighted reading that has no idea where the shoreline ends.

Cross-shopped today against bulky housings for modern cameras, the Nikonos still wins on size and simplicity. Nothing else this small lets you treat a 35mm body like dive gear, and that is why people keep hunting down clean ones decades after the last one left the factory.