Nikon fe review
For a couple of years I had been carrying about my Hasselblad to photograph the things around me, its a beautiful camera and takes wonderful images, but some times you just want something more compact. I started looking at 35mm cameras again, and at this point I already owned a Nikon F which I loved (and may do a future review on) but I wanted something with a functional light meter.
Nikon 35mm film cameras are excellent and have a wide lens selection so of course I wanted to stay with them and what I eventually ended up with was the Nikon FE.
Nikon produced both the FE (electronic) and FM (mechanical), and over the last few years I have always tried to only buy mechanical cameras, but what I found unusual about these two cameras, was their light meter display.
The FM was released first, had the Nikon F mount so would take all Pre-AI and AI lenses onward, and a mechanical shutter with a speed up to 1/1000th of a second, the light meter however had an LED display with featured a ‘-’ for under exposed ‘+’ for over and ‘o’ for correctly exposed.
The FE came out a few years later and contains a traditional style match point needle type meter which raises and lowers along a scale to display the appropriate shutter speed for the set aperture - this is my favourite kind of display, because its easy to read, and gives you an understanding of how under or over exposed your image is. the FE also featured aperture priority mode, which when set, would select a shutter speed appropriate for your aperture to obtain a good exposure.
Now the reason I found their light meter choices unusual, was that the earlier mechanical camera featured the electronic LED readout, and the mechanical camera had the more traditional analogue readout, I decided to opt for the FE because of the match needle.
So how do I feel about the FE?
Well, it’s a bloody wonderful camera! It’s built well, the light meter is a joy to read, the shutter sounds lovely (which always strangely important to me) and it’s been absolutely flawless for me. I bought it used - of course, from a well know auction site for less than £200 and in my opinion its the perfect camera for anyone wanting a 35mm camera that’s new to photography or not so new!
As well as having an aperture priority mode, it has an exposure compensation dial, multiple exposure lever, and the winding lever when pushed forward acts as a shutter lock to stop you accidentally taking photos (listen up Leica).
another nice feature of the FE, which is not seen on later model Nikon cameras is the Automatic Indexing tab, which is on the lens mount and synchronises with the aperture ring on the lens to tell the camera what aperture is set. On this camera it is made of metal, and can be flipped up out of the way to allow Pre-AI lenses to be mounted. On later Nikon cameras this was replaced with a solid plastic tab which didn’t flip up, and could become broken if you attempted to fit the older type lenses.
So, lenses?
Well Nikon produced a lens for just about every situation you can think of, from ultra-wide fish eyes, and tilt shift lenses, through to a 1200mm telephoto, so you have a huge selection available, a lot of them are of exceptional quality and many of them very good value. The lenses I have are the 28mm 2.8 AI, 50mm 1.8 AI, and the 85mm f2 AI, and they cover most situations. The AIS series are the later models, usually just an updated version of the AI, the mounts for them both are the same, so interchangeable with one another.
So, in all, if you fancy an FE, I think you should do it!
