And it is, too… but you’ll have to open this up and read it to find out what it is.
No more hints.
Anyway, so did you get the hints? Fabulously Groovy? Flipping Great? Fantastically Grand?
It’s the Nikon FG!
After looking at the F100, F4, and a bunch of other film Nikons, I came upon the Fg totally by accident and thanks to ebay’s tendency to include similar-ish items to search results.
I was looking for an fa in good condition, with the little finger grabby thing, without the power winder, when the fg popped up in the list.
Being the successor to the em, the FG is smaller than the fa and fe/fm line, and it allows full manual exposure control unlike its predecessor or successor. The only thing missing is that it turns into a paperweight without batteries, but at $58 with a 50mm f/1.8 E Series kit lens (that tends to go for $60-70 on its own), what did I have to lose?
Short answer: nothing. The fg is fantastically grand, flipping great, and fabulously groovy.
Again, my product photography needs some work: the chrome is a bit overexposed… but the little fg looks like a jewel, and trust me it is, and despite the lack of a Ken Rockwell review.
Plenty of others have reviewed the fg, and they tend to fall into two, similar camps: those who are new to the camera and love it, and those who had one back in the day and either miss it, continue to use it, or recently re-purchased it. (I found one user that was wildly disappointed with his copy, but he admits that he ended up with a lemon.)
I, for one, absolutely adore it.
mir has a good overview of the specs and a very thorough, multi-page technical review, so I won’t bore you with that. Others do a much better job anyway.
Over the coming days/weeks, I’ll share the first few rolls with you, and make some further comments on the camera. And over the coming year(s), I hope to do some comparison-type lens and usability reviews between crop-sensor dslr and film slr.
Product shots captured with the D7000 and Nikkor 28-105D, with the Toshiba 312 mounted on the camera and the SB-700 in optical slave mode hard camera left, to blow out the background.
