My dream camera

Author's Rating:

Pros: Light Durable Simple Fun

Cons: Manual focus Max 1 sec shutter on manual

The Bottom Line: 
If you like manual focus, manual wind, simple automatic exposure, and Nikon lenses this is your dream camera. It should be illegal to have this much fun with a camera.

Author's Review
I bought a FT-2 in 1976. Shortly after that the FE came out and I had spent 25 years wishing I'd waited for the FE. I like manual focus, I like manual film wind, but pure manual exposure is difficult for people pictures. Especially when you are focusing manually, to stop and adjust the match needle often loses the picture. If the person (child) you are photographing moves, you refocus, find that the exposure in the new location is different, fiddle with the match needle, and the picture is gone.

I don't like autofocus much. For close ups with short tele lenses I want to choose whether the eyes are in perfect focus and the ears slightly blurred, or vice versa. Usually I want the catchlights in the eyes in perfect focus, and autofocus may be focusing on the nose or ears.

But I do like having the autoexposure option for the reasons above. If I am shooting a landscape I might switch to manual, if I am doing a formal portrait I may use an incident meter, but if I am chasing my kids around on a playground I like having autoexposure built it. Granted the 60/40 system isn't the world's most sophisticated, but it works absolutely fine with print film, especially B&W. If you are shooting professional or commercial pictures using slide film you may want more sophisticated metering, but in that case you probably aren't chasing the kids around on the playground anyway.

After 25 years of using the FT-2, I finally treated myself to a used FE. It was a dream. Then the FM-3a came out about a month after I bought the FE. I could have kicked myself. Fortunately, the lovely people at the camera store took the FE back and let me buy the FM-3a. It is _really_ my dream camera.

If you like manual focus and manual wind, and have the most basic understanding of f stops and shutter speeds, this camera is as easy to use as a camera can possibly be. It is light, easy to handle, the controls are few and intuitive, and it just sets you free to take pictures and have fun. Nice touches are DX coding and the little window to see what film is inside (my FT-2 didn't have that and I often forgot if a couple of weeks went by).

One of the other reviewers compared it to a Swiss watch and I would agree, but it compares to a simple mechanical Rolex, not a modern multi function electronic watch. The Rolex does not have 3000 stopwatch, heart rate, calculator, dual time zone, alarm, countdown functions, it just tells the damn time and tells it just right.

This camera does not have 3000 automatic options. It just holds your favorite Nikon lens, puts the film the right distance behind it, is easy to hold and focus, and gets the exposure right. I enjoy simple high functioning tools and this is one of the nicest tool of any kind I have ever held. Until it breaks (which should be a very long long time) I won't be buying or using anything else.