burkphoto wrote:
Full name was Nikon F, Photomic FTn. I own one. Yes, the difference was the viewfinder. The standard Nikon F came with just an optical pentaprism viewfinder and NO meter. The Nikon F, Photomic FTn has the center-weighted meter-equipped viewfinder.
As I recall, there were at least five viewfinders for the Nikon F.
Mine was originally the FTn with 50mm f/1.4. It sold in the USA for $443 list, but few people paid that, unless they were wealthy or uninformed. Discounts of 20% or more were common then.
$443 in 1969 equates to roughly $3,135 in 2020, according to my inflation calculator app. That's why, as a 14-year old in 1969, I bought a Nikkormat FTn with 50mm f/1.4 instead. It was $237.95 at Altman's in Chicago (which equates to roughly $1684 in 2020). I had earned it by selling prints to classmates and the yearbook staff at my school (images made with a borrowed Canon FX).
I inherited the FTn in 1972, when my step-uncle died. He had bought it in Hong Kong, a week before his death. It had half a roll of exposed Ektachrome in it.
After living with about 20 different film cameras and 10 digital cameras over the years, I have to reflect that the Nikon FTn was elegant, rugged as a tank, precise... but awkward to use, and ergonomically challenging and quirky. The Nikon F3, on the other hand, was my favorite 35mm SLR of all time. I have one of those, too. I had two of them at one time. It was all I ever needed in a 35mm film camera.
Full name was Nikon F, Photomic FTn. I own one. Ye... (
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I bought a Nikon F Photomic with the 50mm f/1.4 and the 35mm f/3.5 lens as my first Nikon. I was a student at Brook's at the time. Everyone was buying the Nikon F because it was said to be so sharp and so like a fool, I traded my Leica M3 and lenses in for the Nikon. It was the biggest mistake of my life. The Leica allowed me to make 16" x 20" and larger B&W prints that were sharp while the Nikon images could not hold up to that much enlargement without loosing sharpness. The problem with some of the early Nikon F lenses were that they were in fact process lenses designed to look good on the lens charts that magazines of the time used to judge lenses for their product reviews and also because Nikon had not yet learned how to color correct lenses to the degree that Leica had. I ended up selling my Nikons and going to the Rollie's and large format cameras for a number of years after that. In any case, I switched back to Nikons about 25 ago because Nikon resolved the issues that some of those early lenses had.