The Nikon F2

A very short review.

I have used Pentax film cameras since the 1980s: mostly the MX. I recently bought a Nikon F2 with the DP1 finder (this makes it a ‘Photomic’) mostly because I could get it with an 85mm lens for far leas than the Pentax 85/1.4 on its own. Of course the 85mm I bought it for is slower (f/2) than the Pentax one and this was mostly GAS. I won’t even talk about the second, plain prism, body I now own.

The good

It is a very well-made mechanical SLR: everything works right. It’s tough, but if you drop it on concrete it will at least get dented. If you do that you may be lucky and be able to fix it with a hammer: I did. The DP1 is fine, but check it works. You can get some really nice focussing screens. Having the lock/open key on the baseplate is nice. Even without using the shutter lock it is much harder to make accidental exposures than the Pentax MX or LX.

The bad

It is a heavy camera. I can carry an MX for hours in one hand; I need a shoulder strap for this. It’s too easy to leave the meter on.

The way lenses talk to the head changed during the life of the camera, and later heads won’t couple properly with older (‘pre-AI’, ‘AI’ being ‘auto indexing’) lenses. The DP1 will talk to anything with the sticky-up prongs but you always need the ‘Nikon shuffle’ to tell the head how fast the lens is. I almost never change lenses so this is a non-problem for me. Lenses without prongs will not talk to the metered heads at all.

The ugly

The plain-prism F2 is a pretty camera: the metered-prism ones are, at best, functional-looking. They’re less ugly than the F Photomic, at least.

The unsurprising

It will not make you a better photographer. The newest F2 is now forty-five years old: it will need occasional care and attention and perhaps more than that. Foam will need replacing. The metered prisms may or may not work, and may be intermittent when they do. For the DP1 check that it properly registers the aperture after doing the shuffle. Model names are somewhat confusing and generally refer to the head, not the camera itself. Many F2s were used by professionals and will now be more-or-less battered.

It is not magic. It is a very good mechanical 35mm SLR, and perhaps the best there ever was. I am not planning on selling either of mine and would buy another if I lost one.

This is the second of two posts that sat around for a long time.