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In Being There Part 1 I bewailed the trend of gear collectors and people who buy classic cameras to take pictures of their cat and their back garden. Now it’s time to get on and talk about the photographer as the documenter.
Photography has many angles to it but one of the most interesting is the documentary photographer. Documentary work, at its most basic, can be deeply personal like pictures of your family over time but at its peak can scale up to changes of your own environment, your town and the people that inhabit it over time. At its core, documentary work captures moments in time, characters and events.
Documentary photography serves a valuable purpose – it acts as a time vault for later generations to see the past, how people lived, the clothes they wore, the foods they ate and much else besides providing a valuable glimpse for future generations.
The work of documentary photography may take years to compile the shots so it’s critical if this is your area of interest that you run multiple projects and keep these in mind every time you are out with your camera. Currently I am running a whole batch of projects and I don’t expect to have a completed folio in much less than 5 years of any of them. My current projects cover people’s relationships to their smartphones, the plight of the homeless, and my local area and its street life but I also do mini projects like the current film revival. Anything can be grist for the mill.
Homeless Immigrant in Bruges with Kosmo Films Agent Shadow at 800ASA
From my people and phones project now in its third year. Ilford HP5.
Film Revival Project. Market Trader at Portobello Market. Ilford FP4.
Documentary work is painstaking, you need to compile the shots over a long period of time, structure the pictures to tell stories and of course keep everything catalogued. It’s also helpful if you can chat with the subjects and get a bit of back story to add some colour and depth to the photographs or at least some history behind what’s going on in the picture. This is the basis of a photo essay. It all takes time to do but can be very rewarding. Patience is elixir of this kind of work. Both of my main projects have been running for almost 3 years and I am still far away from a completed folio.
Will anyone ever see your work or care? Well one can never know whether the work is valuable. Only time can truly tell and very often photographs are lost and then found again revealing a glimpse of life in a bygone age. Only a few years ago a huge cache of negatives was found showing peasant life in Russia in the 1920s and these provide valuable insights into life, customs and work at the time. Personally, I do this kind of thing because it provides a solid focus and stops me wasting film if I know I am looking for particular shots. It doesn’t stop me taking pictures of other interesting shots but it does provide some structure to my shooting.
If your nervous about photographing people for this kind of work you either have to find the raw nerve and ‘front’, develop a charming demeanour or learn how to be invisible. I use a combination of all three. Sometimes I will just rush in take the picture and retreat if the person looks like they will be hostile, sometimes a smile and a ‘Hi’ will get them smiling and then you can show them the camera and see how they react and other times for candids you need to be invisible. Keep the camera out of sight, pre focus and meter and then just snap or alternately ‘long lens’ them. When working in foreign climes its generally best to adopt the ‘show the camera’ approach because local sensibilities can be very different. You also need some consideration about local conditions. In some environments you will be using a camera that represents 5 years wages to the local population so a good chunk of empathy and understanding is needed as to local sensitivities.
The pre-focus and meter and snap it off approach. Person in animated argument with street warden. Ilford FP4.
Shoot a few blanks until they go natural and then shoot. Christmas Market in Bruges. Agent Shadow at 400.
Stealthy – keeping the camera out of sight, prefocus and meter. Ilford HP5.
Language barrier? No problems, show them the camera and if they smile and nod its ok. Gate guard on Kos. Ilford FP4.
Getting it ‘natural’ is also a challenge when photographing people for documentary work. Anyone who has owned a camera for more than a week will realise that when you photograph people they tend to ‘freeze’, they go rigid and ‘unnatural’ and the art is to make it look like everyday life. You can adopt the approaches I mentioned but you can also just chat with people, keep the camera in view and your eye in but don’t be shooting. Just let them get used to the camera being there and eventually in a few minutes they will relax and forget the camera is even there and that’s when you start shooting. It’s a tricky act to keep a conversation flow going while working with a camera and it really only comes from experience and knowing your camera well enough to be able to run yourself in ‘Auto’ mode.
Eugene Smith used this approach in his photo essay ‘A Country Doctor’ for Time Life. He spent a month going around with the doctor and shooting an empty camera to acclimatise people to his presence and the camera and if you want to see excellent documentary photography you could do worse than look up Eugene Smith’s work. Mentioning Eugene Smith it’s the perfect example of photography not being about the gear but about the ability. So many amateur photographers are more obsessed about the hardware than they are about actually taking good pictures. Eugene’s Minamata series is amazing and mostly shot with quite low end cameras by todays standards. I have purposely not added what kit was used to each of the photos in this article in a probably hopeless attempt to stop gear-heads thinking the camera is what makes the pics and then rushing out to buy the same camera. Trust me they were all shot on pretty basic vintage cameras using very far from top end lenses – mostly a standard 50mm lens.
One of the most beautiful pieces of documentary work I have seen recently comes from Chuck Fong. Chuck has spent an immense amount of time documenting the American Diner and has published a book called ‘Dinor Bleu – The Vanishing American Diner’ which is a rich tapestry of this vanishing piece of Americana. The photographs are beautiful and cover a huge range of styles that give you a generous portion of the slice of life (and a good dose of inspiration too!). It’s this kind of work that gives a real insight into a whole sub-culture as well as providing some very beautiful images and Chuck has used a wide variety of styles. If you are looking for inspiration to get a project going then Chucks work should light a fuse under you.
I was most inspired in my own documentary work by National Geographic pictures of locations and their rich coverage of places, people and events. We cant all be afforded that capability but a solid project need not take you too far or, like Chucks work on American Diners, can be done over an extended period of time.
Even a humble holiday can yield results, don’t snap away at the local landmarks along with the other grockles, get one or two positioning shots and then look for the small stuff and the local people to add colour and context. I mentioned in Part 1 of ‘Being There’ that travel will almost always provide better opportunities. You don’t have to go to Outer Mongolia but you can spend a long weekend somewhere looking for, and getting, pictures for far less than the latest gizmo. I use holidays and breaks as a kind of mini documentary. I’ll get some landscapes and picture postcard stuff but I’ll really be looking for the stories in a place.
Monschau, Germany – its hard to get a bad shot here. This was taken with Fuji 400 and a polariser to really load those colours
Bruges, one of my favourite haunts for photography. Cinestill 800 with a daylight correction filter.
When visiting places make sure to get the local color which will be usually more interesting than buildings. Street performers in Monschau. Agfa APX400.
Look for the ‘off the map’ stuff. This is a disused factory in Solingen. Kosmo Agent Shadow at 400.
A solid project in mind like a documentary set of pictures will push your skills, keep you focused, keep you out of the comfort zone and hopefully improve your photography.
Go away now and aim to get some pictures that really pop in 2025. It’s never too late to make a New Years resolution so make yours about getting some good shots.
Picture at the top of the article was a Beijing street shot with a Lumix TZ80, converted to black and white and post processed for contrast adjustment. Shot ‘on the fly’ so as not to spook the subjects.
Mel is one of the driving forces behind High 5 Cameras and writes all our articles.
Starting serious photography back in 1972. Over the years she got to shoot film with most of the major brands in 35mm and large format as both a studio photographer and content provider for websites in the early life of the web. These days she is rediscovering photography and has become the GOTO person for knowledge on camera repair advice.
Nikon F Review – Perhaps the most iconic camera of all time is the Nikon F. Still a desirable camera for both photographers and collectors after 65 years. Used by pretty much every press packer in its day, photographers in the Vietnam war, and the US space program. Instantly recognisable in any movie and the preferred camera of many photo-journalists.
I used one back in the glory days of film SLRs and still use one today.
So why is it so revered? Is it as good as it’s supposed to be? Is it really indestructible? Lets take a look…
Nikon F Review – The classic Nikon F with Photomic FTn Finder and 50mm f1.4 – the only camera I ever really need.
Rallying the troops…A little history lesson on the Nikon F.
It’s a little known fact that Nikon management were not keen on the SLR concept. Nikon had carved out a nice niche for themselves in the rangefinder market. They were pitched squarely against Leica who they had their sights set on. Photojournalists in the Korean War stopping over in Japan were amazed at how good Nikons lenses were. They started touting Nikon lenses to their friends. As a result Nikon had already started to eat some of Leicas market for glass. So it was natural for Nikon, with Leica in their sights, to focus on rangefinder cameras at the time.
It seems neither Pentax or its management, who pretty much perfected the SLR, were ever keen on the SLR design. They felt 35mm would never have the quality required for serious photography and favoured medium format film. However, in the end they were swayed and the SLR concept gained traction. Nikon management took a view that the SLR was not where serious photographers would spend their cash. Remember they were gunning for Leica and many photojournalists back then were Leica users. They were eventually swayed, so they adapted their SP rangefinder to accept a mirror and a prism. The F was born.
The Nikon F Prototype on show at the Nikon Museum, Tokyo clearly showing its SP rangefinder heritage.
In 1957 the management at Nikon authorised 3 prototypes. These were essentially Nikon SPs with some extra bits bolted on to prove (or disprove) the concept. The initial prototypes had a straight through finder along with their SLR finder as Nikon felt the ‘blackout’ as the mirror went up might put some photojournalists off the whole idea. You can see the finder window on the right side of the camera at the Nikon Museum in Tokyo. It must have worked well enough because in 1959 Nikon unveiled the Nikon F. The rest, as they say, is history…
It has been said that it was Konica who started the ball rolling and started making the coffin the German camera industry would be consigned to but it was most definitely Nikon who banged the last nails in. Probably using a Nikon F to hammer those nails down – it’s a very tough old camera.
Building up…. The Nikon F Design
The original Nikon F was designed to use titanium shutter blades. Such was the pace of demand that the earliest ones used a cloth shutter. These very early ones are highly desired by collectors and can fetch very large sums if original and clean. Sales took off so fast for the Nikon F that the factory initially couldn’t keep up. Nikon quite literally couldn’t make them fast enough. Even senior management could be seen on the factory floor hastily helping to assemble Nikon Fs. Penance for being doubtful about the viability of the SLR concept – that’s karma for you.
Nikon went their own way on design of the F. The camera was designed to be entirely modular with replaceable prisms, focus screens and film backs. They opted for a very harsh looking design with squared off edges. This was quite different to other cameras around which had largely favoured a contoured and curved look. Nikon were quite intentional about this – they wanted the camera to stand out.
Nikon F Review – Early Nikon Page Ads from 1960 and 1962 stress the Nikon Fs lineage and modularity.
The camera is fully metal through and through – even the shutter blades are titanium. Under the skin it’s quite a simple beast and it’s designed from the ground up to be tough and reliable. Needless to say there’s no plastic in the design apart from a few minor trim items on later models.
Make no mistake though for all its simplicity and agricultural mechanics the F was primo gear. A standard body with the basic prism and 50mm f1.4 lens would be costing around £3,000 in todays money. Inflation calculators only tell half the story though. In the money of the day a basic new F was approximately half the price of a new Austin Mini.
On release the Nikon F had a standard prism but it was quickly upgraded. First there was an external meter that clipped on to the top of the camera. Then a metered head which used a separate photocell (Photomic T). Later still through the lens metering (Photomic Tn) with its averaged meter pattern. Finally the ultimate finder the Photomic FTn setting the standard for all future Nikon finders. Utilising the classic 60% centre weighted metering pattern. It also set the standard for what a Nikon F should look like with its weird, other worldly, asymmetrical look. This made the Nikon F instantly recognisable.
For a more detailed look at Nikon F finders follow take a look at Mir.Com
Nikon F Review – Nikon advertising from 1965 stresses the ‘Pro’ angle, the modularity and of course their newest TTL finder. Like most Nikon advertising it was low key and understated.
There were other finders available for the Nikon F including a waist level finder, a sports action finder and a magnifying finder but the Photomic FTn would be the one that almost anyone would recognise and for me it’s quintessential finder for the F.
Nikon would go on and bash out almost a million Nikon Fs over 13 years. Indeed, such was the demand, production carried on for 12 months AFTER the replacement, the F2, appeared as Nikon filled back orders and even new orders from people who demanded the original Nikon F.
Combat…The Nikon F takes on all comers…
The Nikon F quickly became a favourite for photo journalists and press packers. It was used by photographers extensively in Vietnam where its high quality lenses, toughness and reliability was greatly appreciated. Some of the most iconic images from the Vietnam war were shot by photographers like Tim Page, Nick Ut and Don McCullin using Nikon Fs and of course it’s lived on in a clutch of Vietnam War movies like Apocalypse Now and Full metal Jacket.
Tim Page sporting a Leica, Nikon F, a Nikkorex and a machine gun! Who said camera straps were for sissies. – Nikon F Review
Nick Ut with a Nikon F and a lot of mud. Nick Ut would take one of the most iconic images of Vietnam with a Leica.- Nikon F Review
Don McCullin with a Nikon F, probably in Hue where he would take one of the outstanding pictures of the war. – Nikon F Review
The camera itself and Nikons design and manufacture takes some of the credit but what really drove the Nikon F to be top dog in the rarefied air of professionals was the marketing genius of Joe Ehrenreich the US distributor. He saw to it that every major photojournalist was seen using a Nikon F at major events. He also saw to it that NASA selected the F for space missions and that it was seen draped around the necks of everyone and anyone who might need serious photography. The Nikon F would make Nikon synonymous with quality professional gear for a long time to come and cement Nikons position as THE professional choice.
Interestingly Nikons marketing was elegant, professional but very subdued even by the standards of the 1950s and 1960s but then when you’re getting your camera seen with everyone who’s anyone including astronauts and Hollywood celebs then magazine adverts can afford to be not much more than ‘stop me and buy one’.
Nikon F Review – Everyone wanted a Nikon F and Nikon were very adroit in getting it seen with celebs – (l-r) Mick Jagger, Brigitte Bardot, Janis Joplin, Marilyn Monroe, Leonard Nimoy, Paul McCartney.
Retirement – The War is Won
The Nikon F was finally discontinued in 1972 – a year after the Nikon F2 replaced it. Apparently Nikon still had backorders on their system. Such was the demand for the F that even with the later, more refined F2 available people out there still wanted the original and so Nikon carried on turning them out for around 12 months after the replacement F2 was available. Production of the F stopped sometime in 1972 after an estimated 862,200 units had been produced. For a camera that sold less than a million units the F had created a huge impact and was instrumental in propelling Nikon to an almost unassailable position for almost 30 years. It had firmly won the war for Nikon but also crucially won the hearts and minds of its customers which would stand Nikon in good stead going forward. Other companies raced to catch up with the Nikon F – Minolta with their technical marvel the X1 which appeared just as the F phased out in favour of the F2. The X1 was a technological tour-de-force but it never found favour with professionals and was too expensive for almost anyone else. Canon, likewise, launched the F1 in 1971 but Canon would play catch up with Nikon for years and would never make more than a small dent in Nikons professional sales. Both Minolta and Canon tried to out engineer Nikon and missed the fact that Nikons foothold was not based on technical supremacy but marketing and the huge lead they had acquired. Canon eventually just gave up and went in a different direction. And no other camera company could ever get a foothold into Nikons professional market until 1989 with the launch of the Canon EOS-1.
Nikon F Review – Pretender to the throne No.1. The amazing Minolta X1. Minolta would try to out tech the Nikon F2 but it was never successful.
Nikon F Review – Pretender to the throne No.2. The beautifully engineered Canon F1. Superb but too late – Nikons lead from the F was too large.
This is my Nikon F…There are many like it but this one is mine
I will confess to being pretty passionate about the Nikon F. As I grew up it was the camera that many people, including myself aspired to. It had almost mythical status. Sadly, as I already covered it was priced well out of the range of most including the pimply teenager version of myself back then.
I used to look at them in shop windows with my nose pressed against the glass. I eventually owned an Olympus OM-1 which was itself a pro camera but priced less aggressively than Nikon who could wring some more shekels out of people just for the name!
But as luck would have it around 1977 a Nikon F turned up in my local camera store followed by another soon after and the prices were getting a lot lower. This was undoubtedly due to the F2 putting in an appearance and finally getting traction as pros started trading in for F2s and the price of the now semi obsolete F model was reduced to a low enough price for me to afford – I swear when I eventually got one even 2nd hand it felt like I had been held upside down by my ankles by the camera shop and given a shake just to get the last few coins out of me. I don’t know – maybe the camera store owner took pity on a young waif of a girl with a passion for film. In any event I ended up with two of them and some nice lenses and for a very long time they were my primary shooters. I used them extensively for press work and product shoots at one time.
Nikon F Review – This is my Nikon – there are many like it but this one is mine. Surrounded by some of its vintage glass that’s still used regularly.
So how does it handle? It’s one heavy lump of a camera for sure weighing in at 1.2kg with a 50mm f1.4 and the FTn finder. I used to lug two of them with a camera bag but these days due to advancing years if I take an F with me it’s likely just the camera and one lens due to the weight. ‘Scuse my weediness I’m sure.
The viewfinder is a bit dated and nothing like as expansive as an Olympus OM-1 or as bright as a Minolta XD. The film advance has a grindy feel and is quite crunchy lacking the smoothness of a Minolta XD or a Canon FTb. Lens mounting is a bit of a faff with the Nikon shuffle – when you change lenses you need to twist the lens aperture to the smallest f stop (eg f16) for easy removal and then when mounting a new lens rotate the lens all of the way to the widest aperture (eg f1.4) and then back to synchronise the meter. Crikey! That’s sounds a faff! You do get used to it but it’s nowhere near as slick as Minoltas MC (Meter Coupled) system where you just plug the lens on and the camera sorts itself out. Nikon did eventually get it right by copying Minolta about 10 years later and calling their system AiS (Auto Indexing System).
With a removable prism the F has a fitting for a hot shoe over the rewind capstan
Festooned with buttons and knobs – note the early NK stamping. Laters ones are stamped Nikon.
With the prism removed you can change focus screens. This is the ‘E’ type grid screen.
Older Nikon lenses all feature the trademark lobster claws on the top of the lens. It’s these claws which link to the meter. You can use lenses that are missing the claws like the much later E Series lenses but you would need to use stop down metering – many later lenses omitted the claws as Nikon moved to the AiS system.
The F doesn’t have a hinged film door. Instead like an old school rangefinder the entire door slides away from the body. In some ways its less fiddly for loading film but in other ways it’s an absolute arse of a job if your mobile and you really do have to be careful around those titanium shutter curtains. The removable back and base was so Nikon could add alternate backs/bases for motor drives and auto winders.
The ‘Lobster Claws’ exposure meter coupling prongs.
Nikon F – Film door comes away completely allowing different backs to be added.
The Nikon F Titanium Shutter Curtains.
So, given all those apparent down sides why use it? Simple – the quality. It may be less tech, less smooth but it’s super reliable, built like a tank, its huge weight and all metal construction means mirror slap is almost undetectable. So much so you could be forgiven for thinking you were shooting a rangefinder – it’s that solid! And…The camera and lenses always deliver great results.
Is it as tough as they say? I can’t say for sure but I used one of mine to smack a wallaby on the head after Skippy decided to kick a load of small kids to the ground and then started bouncing on them and looked like it fancied its chances against me. One smack on the head from the Nikon F being used like a mace and chain convinced the wallaby that laying down and playing possum might be smarter than to carry on pushing its luck. I have always felt a bit guilty about that – the Nikon could have suffered real damage.
I use mine with vintage Nikon glass from the same period as the camera and while not all of the vintage glass gives as good results compared to later model lenses the massive stand out though is the 50mm f1.4 Nikkor which always delivers. I’d go as far as to say if I could only keep one camera and one lens the Nikon F with its 50mm f1.4 would probably be the one (God forbid I should ever have to choose though).
Nikon F, 50mm f1.4 Nikkor-S – Mod Scooter with Expired Fuji 400 scanned to B&W
Nikon F, 50mm f1.4 Nikkor-S with Fuji 100 Technical Film – River Thames and converted Mill House
Nikon F, 50mm f1.4 Nikkor-S and Ilford FP4 – Painshill Park
For you the war is over….Buying a Nikon F today…
If this article has made you want to get out there, get a Nikon F and pretend you’re Dennis Hopper in ‘Apocalypse Now’ or maybe David Hemmings in ‘Blow Up’ then get ready to spend some cash. The Nikon F is tough but like any old camera they were designed to be serviced regularly. Runners are not hard to find that will reliably advance and fire but you may find the shutters are running slow on many of them. Finding an FTn finder with a working meter is also a challenge.
The most basic un-metered prism is paradoxically the most expensive prism of the lot these days. With that said even if a Tn or FTn metered head has a non running meter it’s still perfectly useable as a finder.
The F doesn’t suffer too many major issues as its such a basic camera in its design but like any of the top end classics spares are hard to come by and likely to be expensive. Even people selling complete wrecks usually want £100+.
My current Nikon F (because like an idiot I sold the original pair for pennies as digital took over) was purchased in Tokyo with a working FTn meter head, the much sought after ‘E’ type focus screen with grid lines and a 50mm f1.4 at a cost around £280. The camera was a solid runner but testing back in the UK showed its shutter speeds were off and meter calibration was out. I had mine serviced to get the meter calibrated for use with 1.5v batteries and have the camera given a thorough service. Servicing costs topped £150 for the camera and an additional £50 for the lens so the whole package came in at £480. You can see its not a cheap classic to own but after servicing my own Nikon F shoots perfectly.
I mentioned the meter recalibration. The Nikon FTn head was designed with 1.35v mercury batteries in mind. You can use 1.5v and compensate in your shooting or you can use Zinc-Air batteries and an adaptor (for more information read my article on powering old cameras here). There is some information out there that says that due to the design of the FTn head the camera will compensate for 1.5v batteries – I found that NOT to be the case. I don’t like the faff of compensating for higher battery voltage as it can lead to mistakes and constantly changing zinc-airs in the meter head is also a faff. The battery chamber in the FTn finder is underneath the meter head requiring the meter head to be removed. It’s not hard but it is a nuisance so I had the meter recalibrated for 1.5 Silver cells which was the best compromise.
The most common issues with old Nikon Fs is a degraded prism caused by foam break down inside the prism, dead meter cells and damaged focus screens. It’s very hard to find a perfect focus screen. Other issues are people poking the very fragile titanium shutter blades. Reject any camera with shutter blade damage as repair costs will be very high. The prism itself on all versions contains foam which will degrade and slowly eat the prism silvering – unless the foam is changed out its a question of when, not if, the prism gets destroyed.
If you’re going to buy a Nikon F then servicing is a must. Ignore people who will tell you that an F is so indestructible it never needs servicing – chances are it will shoot but poor lubrication and a lack of attention to the finders internal foam seals may soon render the camera inoperable or junk. Spares are expensive and hard to come by so treat the camera with the respect it deserves and get it serviced.
Nikon F Review – My own Nikon F with an elderly Nikkor-Q 135mm lens. Like the camera the lenses from this period often need servicing.
This is the end…
The Nikon F set Nikon up for huge success in the professional market place. As mentioned no other company could get a serious foothold in the professional market for years after the lead that the Nikon F had established – its rivals like the Canon F1 and the Minolta X1 would take 10 years to develop and appear right at the very end of the Nikon Fs production run – Nikon had had a 10 year lead which turned out to be almost impossible to overturn.
Canon, Minolta and Olympus would all make sales in Nikons ‘Pro’ market space but these were no more than a fleabite on the hide of the Nikon elephant. Nikon went on refining their professional products and it would not be until 1989, 30 years later and the launch of the EOS-1 that Canon would finally start to wrest away the professional market from Nikon.
The F is instantly recognisable in many classic and cult films and these have only served to increase its allure for many modern film photographers. (L-R) Kevyn Major Howard as ‘Rafterman’ in Full Metal Jacket, Dennis Hopper as the photojournalist in Apocalypse Now, Sigourney Weaver as Diane Fossey in Gorillas in the Mist and Linda Hunt (in an amazing performance) as Billy Kwan from The Year of Living Dangerously.
The Nikon F being used by David Hemmings in the cult movie ‘Blow Up’.
Paradoxically the very success of the F would be Nikons undoing. Nikons downfall would, in part, be the struggle to keep compatibility with the Nikon F lens mount in a fast changing market made even tougher with the development of auto-focus. The desire to keep the F mount had its parallel with Pentax years earlier who persisted with the M42 mount – by the time Pentax woke up and delivered the ‘K’ mount they had been overtaken. Pentax would never recover – and neither would Nikon.
To their credit Nikon tried hard at keeping stuff compatible but it came at the price of not being easily able to adopt new technology – like many companies being at the top for so long proved in some ways a disadvantage. Arrogance creeps in and never losing can itself be a weakness.
Nikon compatibility guides today look like a hologrammatic score for an opera overlaid with Stephen Hawking’s calculations for Black Hole radiation. Canon bit the bullet and just dumped their history and went with an entire new generation of cameras – the EoS and this would enable them to develop new technology faster. Eventually Canons superior Auto-Focus technology made possible by the EoS mount would be the undoing of Nikon aided and abetted by Nikon clinging on to the F mount for far too long.
The Nikon F though lives on as one of the truly iconic classic cameras. It retains a mystique which many later cameras just lack and still retains its near mythic status and an association with glamour which gives it a unique position amongst classic Japanese film cameras from the golden age.
Mel is one of the driving forces behind High 5 Cameras and writes all our articles.
Starting serious photography back in 1972. Over the years she got to shoot film with most of the major brands in 35mm and large format as both a studio photographer and content provider for websites in the early life of the web. These days she is rediscovering photography and has become the GOTO person for knowledge on camera repair advice.
Learn Camera Repair – Although film is making something of a come back, one of the areas that is a huge potential stumbling block is the fact that most professional technicians are now either retired or close to retiring. In the UK over the last few years a whole bevy of some of the most expert repairers have closed up shop leaving classic film camera buffs with few options. Some whole marques and models are now almost unrepairable and with the so often heard advice of ‘just throw it away and buy another’ the available pool of viable cameras will only get smaller.
So how hard is it to do it yourself? What do you need to get started? Is it all worth it? In this article I’ll give you a walk through of my own journey and try to point out some of the pitfalls in learning repair. Now I don’t pretend to be the greatest, the wisest or even universal – after all it’s as big a folly to claim you are universal as it is to claim you are unique.
So how hard is it?
“Is it hard? Not if you have the right attitudes. It’s having the right attitudes that’s hard”
Robert M Persig – Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
If you’re talking replacing light seals or cleaning a battery terminal it’s not very hard at all and indeed some of the more straightforward issues are easily solved with the help of articles and web resources (I publish a few on this site) but if you’re talking actual repairs and full on CLA work (cleaning, lubrication and adjustment) it’s a fair bit tougher.
I’ll tell you what learn camera repair isn’t and maybe that will scare a few people off and save them time from reading the full article. It’s an approach I learnt from Tarkovsky the director of the Soviet Sci Fi film Solaris – Tarkovsky put a huge section of film in just after the start of the movie of a seemingly endless car journey – it’s intention was to use an excruciatingly tedious and dull section of film to drive the dull or unwilling to invest type people out of the cinema as, in Tarkovskys view, they would be unlikely to understand or appreciate the rest of the film – how’s that for stunning condescension. I’ll try to be a bit kinder though.
I can tell you more quickly what camera repair isn’t and it’s not;
Buggering about aimlessly hoping you can make it work.
Pouring lighter fuel or WD40 into a camera or lens based on ‘wotsisname’ on Facebook’s advice.
A quick to learn side hustle with riches at the end of it.
So how do you get started? Well there are two paths to follow – I can only truly relate my own learn camera repair path but my own journey may give you some pointers.
“Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.”
John Milton – Paradise Lost
The first path is you download the Society of Photo-Technologists (SPT) courses and do the theory and practical lessons. The SPT course is very good but you will need to acquire some cameras to do the practical parts of the course with. It’s a long hard road for sure but will give you a good grounding. The course is available at learncamerarepair.com and will give you a solid block of know-how of different types of cameras and their associated shutters, a grounding in electronics and of course critical know how about lens repairs.
The second route, and the way I chose is the school of hard knocks and hands on. Which one works best is really down to how you learn best. For me I never was much one for reading books and theory and will always learn faster through my hands. I like to think of myself as a kind of technological gypsy. Usually I can figure stuff out from any machine just by playing with it, taking it to bits, experimenting, and putting it back together. Now that sounds dangerously like ‘buggering about’ which I cautioned against at the start of the article but it’s more a case of taking pictures and notes, watching how it works by observation. Comparing to service manuals and then reading some theory if I can’t work it out. Confucius wouldn’t have even known what a camera was but his third route to wisdom is very true if you’re doing the same approach as me.
What I will say about my approach is you will almost ALWAYS need a service manual because not everything inside a camera is obvious and of course for some of the set-up and tuning you will need the manufacturers guidance as to what tolerances are allowable and how to align certain parts etc. Bear in mind even relatively simple mechanical cameras may contain around 1500 precision parts and springs. If you’re going to do the “learn as you go” approach you need to have a pretty good grounding in mechanics and basic electronics and a pretty solid understanding of how the camera actually works at the start. If you lack those then the SPT course is probably your better route to knowledge.
Bear in mind the manufacturers service manuals were mostly designed for people who were already proficient at managing camera repair – they are not designed to be a training course for the camera. Without some practical experience the service guides are often no help at all offering little more than exploded diagrams.
Now, I said I generally learn faster using my hands on approach, BUT I also read everything there is to read. I joined forums, read everything that was posted and took onboard advice from genuine acknowledged experts. The best forum for this is the Learn Camera Repair Facebook group because it has genuinely experienced folk in there and not bodgers who are always suitably reined in. Why didn’t I do the SPT course myself? The answer is I originally intended to and being naive at the start imagined it couldn’t be that hard to do. After some time I realised that given my age (ancient) and limited time I could never hope to get competent across a large range of cameras so I specialised. It’s the old, old saw about get big, get niche or get out. I chose niche. In my case I simply won’t live long enough to learn every camera and shutter mechanism – to get where I am now, which is competent on a small handful of camera types and lens repairs has taken 5 years of learning and experience where I spent every weekend working on cameras and quite a few evenings too. Like any serious hobby camera repair takes time and there are no shortcuts.
If you have a passion for a particular camera this approach of just learning a single type or sub-group may work well for you as you can specialise. If you want to be a generalist and/or have a real breadth of knowledge the SPT course is an absolute must.
Learn Camera Repair – One of my early successes. A Chinon 50mm. The lens was a wreck but restored beautifully
Learn Camera Repair – Another early successes. A Chinon 50mm. The lens was a wreck but restored beautifully
My approach was to acquire broken cameras and lenses, download the service guides or even better a tutorial if one was available on the camera and go from there. Initially I worked only on lenses as I already had some experience from working with telescope optics. For lenses and cameras get some hands on and learn how the mechanism works. Good general advice is not to assume a You Tube video is right or sensible or even smart no matter how many followers the YouTuber has – There is much bad practice shown on You Tube videos by people claiming expert status on the basis of ‘likes’ and some of these are positively clueless. Not every YouTuber is an idiot or bodger but unfortunately at the start of your journey you will be hard put to tell which is which. Bad advice extends onto many forums and web pages as well unfortunately. My rule of thumb is don’t trust anyone less experienced than yourself.
“All men are not equal in wisdom – the half-wise are everywhere”
Hávamál
I managed to mash up a Fujica ST605 at the start of my journey from following some You Tube advice which was seriously duff and later on an auto Rokkor after a You Tube video I watched forgot to mention a fairly critical element of the disassembly. I was sufficiently au-fait at the time of the near disaster with the Rokkor and good enough to get myself out of a hole dug by a combination of a less than accurate You Tube guide and my own over confidence about working with a similar model of lens. For a less experienced person it might have been a worse disaster and yet another lens consigned to the bin.
Learn Camera Repair – An early failure – in over my head with a Minolta XG-M – it’s all learning experience.
Learn Camera Repair – A close call when an online video turned out to be in error. Lucky I was good enough to resolve the issues arising.
My journey into the black art of camera repair started by me bagging up anything I could from charity shops but quickly found it’s a hard way of doing it. Some cameras are much harder than others to work on and doubly so when there are no service manuals available and you are on your own with no support and not enough experience to guide you. I have had disasters early on in my own learning experience and you will too for sure – the disasters are a learning experience in their own right. If nothing else you will know that a certain make or model of camera is beyond your ability (at least for the present). It’s a truism that we learn most from our failures – though you don’t want to take that principle too far.
So that’s lesson Number 1, don’t get into this thinking you will be able to fix any camera that ever existed. Most of the pro level amateurs like me tend to specialise in only a few cameras where they have built up some solid experience over time. The real expert older techs can fix most things but they have had 40 years or more to build up the experience and they learnt in a safe environment with more experienced people on hand to help out at the start of their journey PLUS they often had factory training – little of that is available now.
Dip a toe in the water first … so my advice would be buy a camera that has a known issue. Minolta X-700s for instance have known issues with their capacitors. Buy a banger and see if you can fix it. It may have more than the capacitors at fault so you may need to go a bit deeper. This is how you learn to deal with the more common issues. You have to see every camera you buy on this journey not as a possible money maker and a quick side hustle (eg you paid £10 for it but fixed it so you can sell it for £100) but a lesson that’s costing you £10 to learn how to fix that model of camera. I confess when I started I had not thought it would be so hard – experience has shown otherwise. For the hands on learner you should ideally look for something that’s purely mechanical. Find a CLA guide and the service manual and follow that – it will give you experience of taking most of the camera to pieces and learning how parts inter-operate. Be prepared to have to pay for some of these resources.
I learnt the very most about the Minolta SRT-101 from buying a banger that I was sure I could fix because I had already worked on so many of them – this as it turned out was a big mistake! The banger had so much wrong with it that I was initially minded to scrap it for spares but decided to use it as a learning tool. £30 wasted – not a bit of it – it was a massive education for me. There’s no virtue quite like necessity and few better teachers than experience. I learnt lots from that camera but the biggest lesson was lesson number 2 – always keep confidence balanced a safe distance from arrogance and don’t get too big a head. Ego is a problem in any repair work – stay humble.
Learn Camera Repair – Ms Troublesome – maybe the worst SRT I ever worked on but I also learnt the most from this.
Learn Camera Repair – Success – a very troubling repair but persistence always pays off.
Now a word of caution here if you are going to buy a camera to learn with make sure it’s something where there are online resources – manuals, service guides and ideally a tutorial. There’s no point buying a rare HokkiKokki STX-7 if there’s no service guides because you will really struggle and there may be little or no expertise online to help. Another aspect of this is spares availability. Whole legions of cameras are now facing extinction because of shortage of spares. This may be because the camera in question was never very popular so finding a spare is hard (Some of the later Yashica 35mm SLRs for instance) or it may be that the camera is super desirable and consequently even people selling a complete wreck want lots of money for it (Minolta XD/XE and Nikon F2s for example). If you’re going to learn at the start my suggestion would be something you can acquire cheaply both as the learner camera and as a spares source. I ended up doing Minolta SRTs. Not out of any particular passion at the start for them but simply because they were available at a low price and one of the first cameras I ever had to REALLY fix was an SRT which gave me my start. As time goes by you will be able to apply the knowledge from one camera to another.
The experiences of trying to fix any and every camera is what forced me to go niche and just work on a small handful of models. and there’s lesson number 3 – if you butterfly about trying to manage all comers you will more likely fail more often than you succeed. You need to build confidence first and confidence comes from having success. Once you have built on some success you will feel happier and better able to manage something new.
Choose your poison? There is a world of difference between older mechanical cameras and later electronic ones. For electronic cameras you need a fair degree of electronics know how to stand a chance of fixing them. Their mechanics are, at least in some respects, similar but even relatively simple electronic cameras can be a nightmare when things aren’t working.
Learn Camera Repair – Old school mechanical cameras – springs, strings and a profusion of nuts and bolts.
Learn Camera Repair – Late 70s electronic cameras – less nuts and bolts but equally challenging.
What you decide to work on is very much a case of which you feel most comfortable with. The standard camera to learn mechanical SLRs on is the Pentax K1000 which is a simple mechanical camera with minimal electronics. It’s ideal in many ways as it’s entirely mechanical so you can actually see how its works. I transitioned from strictly mechanical cameras like the Pentax K1000 and the Minolta SRT series through to some of the electronic marvels. For me, even with my electronics know how, I think I might have struggled with an electronic wonder without the experience gained on more simplistic cameras.
What do you need to get started?
“An adequate supply of gumption is the first and most important tool. If you haven’t got that you might as well gather up all the other tools and put them away, because they won’t do you any good.”
Robert M Persig – Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance
Attitude and will are the most important tools, but with that said you will get nowhere without the right physical tools for the job. The bare minimum will be a good set of screwdrivers, both JIS and cross headed/flat bladed types, a lens spanner and some rubber cones. Don’t rush in and buy every tool going. I started small – just some good quality tweezers, fine wire cutters, some fine nosed pliers, jewellers drivers and (for Japanese cameras) some JIS screw drivers. Over time I have added extra lens spanners for specific tasks, slotted drivers to deal with specialised nuts and fittings, rubber cones (an absolute must for many lenses). In addition you will need various chemicals and lubricants. There is a complete listing of tools and chemicals at the end of the article with recommendations. It’s best to start small and build up slowly. As with any hobby buy the very best tools you can afford – they will last longer and will not cause you additional grief in repairs. I had something of a hot start as I used to work in electronics so already had a good selection of precision tools and soldering gear.
The cost of tools…What do you need?
The cost of tools is what puts most people off as a hobby. While you can often do some repairs with just a few micro-drivers and a lens spanner for full on work inside most camera bodies you need a wider variety of tools. The more different types of cameras you work with the chances are the more tools you will need. Some of these you will have to make yourself because manufacturers often employed special tools which of course are no longer available.
To really manage repair and servicing work you also need a shutter tester and one that’s capable of measuring curtain speeds if you are working with 35mm camera with focal plane shutters. Many low cost testers on eBay and similar won’t help as they can’t measure curtain speeds and many of these will be useful only for a rough and ready assessment of the shutter speed as they lack accuracy.
And here’s lesson No.4 really – gearing up to do camera repair is expensive. It’s not a cheap hobby and you will struggle to find buyers for your work once you are able to turn out fully serviced cameras. Just look at Facebook groups and see how often the advice is not to bother with repairing a camera and just buy another cheap one on eBay. A fast and profitable side hustle is definitely not what you will find.
My short picks for tools for anyone starting out would be would be…
JIS Screwdriver set from Polar Bear Camera – a perfect set of JIS and flat-bladed drivers to get you going
From left to right lens spanners from Amazon (cheap) from Microtools.de (good) from SK Grimes (The best but expensive)
Rubber cones from Japan Hobby Tools – The best there is
Rocket blower and fine sable brush
These will allow you to work on some lenses and with a few extra bits like a soldering iron and some snipe nosed pliers, wire cutters and tweezers will get you through much of the work on many cameras and lenses. You may need an additional set of watchmakers slotted drivers to deal with some lenses.
You will of course have to invest in assorted materials like light seal foam, lithium grease, moly grease, Nyoil, Isoprop Alcohol, Hydrogen Peroxide, Ammonia and you won’t believe how many cotton buds, cotton wool balls and cocktail sticks you will get through during the average repair. To go with the materials you will also need applicators. I favour syringes and watchmakers precision oilers. You will, if you take up camera repair, have at last a real use for old toothbrushes especially when it comes to cleaning old lubricants.
Now as you progress through repairs you will sooner or later need test equipment. In order to set up most mechanical and electronic SLRs you will need a shutter tester capable of measuring both curtain speeds and shutter speeds and to set up meters on many cameras you will need a calibrated light source. These two items will be the most expensive single part of your tooling and the element that puts most people off doing serious repairs.
Spares Almost no spares exist for many cameras from the golden age of film cameras. Your only chance of spares is cameras which are non-repairable. This is another good reason to stay niche. If you’re trying to spare for lots of different cameras your going to be forever held up waiting for a suitable donor camera to appear. If you stay niche you will very quickly find spares from cameras you messed up while learning. My advice is NEVER, EVER throw anything away and always treat a donor as if it was a worker. Mashing things up to get the bit you want right now usually means you will bust stuff that’s going to be useful later. Broken and non-repairable lenses and bodies are a useful source of spares not just for the critical stuff like focus screens but for the huge assortment of small screws, washers, springs etc. Cost of donor bodies is something you should consider when choosing what cameras and lenses to work on.
Shutter Testers and Calibrated Light Sources – This is where it gets expensive!
Zimmerman ZTS V with calibrated light source – Professional shutter testing but it doesn’t come cheap!
The Reveni Labs shutter tester. If your serious about repairs it may be the answer to your prayers!
There have been various low cost shutter testers developed but few of them are capable of the accuracy required. Old school techs still rely on gear made by Kyoritsu but 2nd hand units are scarce and expensive – you can expect to part with around £3,000 – £5,000 for a working one. The other most common tester from the same period is the Zimmerman ZTS but these are rarer than hens teeth and you can expect to pay around £650-£1,000 for one IF it’s working. The problem with both of these pieces of kit is they are old and reliability is always going to be an issue. Early on I bought the Phochron tester which was a Crowdfunded bit of kit. It’s rather good and subsequent testing comparing it with my pro level ZTS V tester has shown the Phochron comes very close in terms of accuracy for most shutter types (though it doesn’t handle Minolta SRTs well in my experience).
The Phochron – reasonably priced and fairly accurate but now out of production.
The Phochron is now out of production but they do show up for sale periodically for around the £200 mark and they are very accurate – close enough for most amateur level repairs. The other most current tester is the new Reveni Labs tester which sells for around $400 Canadian dollars.
The Reveni Labs https://www.reveni-labs.com/reveni-labs-camera-tester product is probably the closest anyone is going to get for a production made, ready to go tester that can offer pro level features and I fully intend acquiring one myself fairly soon as it is capable of testing for even more conditions than my ancient ZTS V.
You can see from this that learning repairs and doing it right is quite expensive and time consuming. The average CLA time for something like a Minolta SRT-101 is around 6-8 hours) and the demand really isn’t there so if your planning on learning repair you have to be doing it for love not money. If Mammon is your God then you will be disappointed. There are professional techs making a living from the art of camera repair but they tend to ply their trade on the more exotic cameras for which aficionados are willing to pay for.
That’s not a counsel of despair and there are, like me, several people learning and doing good work and I would always encourage people to learn the trade/art/dark magic whichever you prefer but I would also never want to get someone into a financial black hole in a search of El Dorado. You MUST see this, at least in the first phase, as a hobby NOT a money making opportunity.
Summing Up
“There is a great satisfaction in building good tools for other people to use.”
Freeman Dyson
So there you are – what you need is patience, practice and a lot of reading plus taking the occasional slap on the head either from a camera you couldn’t repair or a sudden bang to the head when an experienced expert tells you to shut up and listen. I did say ego is always a drawback so don’t get huffy when an experienced pro gives you advice.
On the upside if, like me, you find it rewarding at an emotional level (because as I explained I doubt you’ll find it rewarding in terms of cash in the bank) to fix old stuff and give these beautiful cameras a second life then you will find much support from others doing the same and who knows – you may end up being the only person doing repairs to a certain model of camera and you may just find a pot of gold out there. If not you can take satisfaction from the skills you acquire, the friendships you make and knowing you have helped preserve a part of 20th century industrial history.
I hope that’s given some of you reading this an insight and maybe a real desire to learn camera repair and get to grips with what can be a very rewarding hobby.
To help beginners to camera repair I have recently made available several guides to some common cameras which will walk you through basic servicing with step by step instructions and pictures. These are availableHERE.
Tools List The list I have assembled are the tools I use most frequently excepting some home made tools for special applications.
A collection of broken cameras – NEVER throw anything away. Non-repairable cameras are a goldmine for small screws, shims, springs, washers etc which are often hard to find.
Mel is one of the driving forces behind High 5 Cameras and writes all our articles.
Starting serious photography back in 1972. Over the years she got to shoot film with most of the major brands in 35mm and large format as both a studio photographer and content provider for websites in the early life of the web. These days she is rediscovering photography and has become the GOTO person for knowledge on camera repair advice.
A step by step repair and servicing guide for Minolta Rokkor PF 50mm f1.7 MC-X Series lens.
The MC-X Rokkor PF is actually part of a series of lenses loosely known as the MC-X series. These were a kind of halfway house between the earlier MC Series and what would be the last Manual Focus series from Minolta, the MD series.
The MC-X series were designed with the Minolta X1 in mind so lack the second lens tab required for full program mode on later Minolta cameras. The MC-X series produced some of the finest manual focus lenses ever made including the 50mm f1.4 PG but as always there were budget lenses also created like the 50mm PF 1.7 and the 50mm f2.
A note of caution here, the MC-X series quite often bear very little relationship to each other in regards of internal design. The 50mm f2 for instance is quite different..
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Many Minolta MC and MD series lenses are very simple to service and there are general guides for the 50mm versions on this site : –
This is not the case with the MC-X 50mm f1.7 which is a horror lens to work on. ALL lenses in this series are best left to people with lens repair experience as they often contain booby traps for the unwary. The 50mm f1.7 is no exception. Without adequate testing gear like a calibrated light source and a shutter tester capable of assessing accuracy of exposure this lens is very hard work indeed. Certainly NEVER tackle one of these without a working example to refer to.
You will need some small containers for screws. I use ice cube trays for my work and use a sharpie pen to scribble as to which screws are in which cell of the container.
This lens was a scrap item and the guide was built during examination as a preparation to doing a viable lens. On this lens the front element has been wrecked and the focus feel was over stiff.
Read through the whole guide before starting so you know what you are doing and always be mindful of what you are doing when you start work. The most common beginner mistake is to press down on the lens and forget that the opposite side is exposed, this can lead to snapped off aperture levers or wrecked front optics. Keep the lens capped on the opposite side to the side you are working. Work slowly and carefully and dont rush. There are no Olympic sports involving the fastest lens rebuild and a rushed job will lead to mistakes.
You will need the following tools and parts to carry out repair and servicing of the MC-X Rokkor 50mm f1.7
First remove the rear lens group. You will need a good lens spanner to get this out as they often have a thread-lock/lacquer applied. If it doesn’t shift quite easily leave it alone. There will be an opportunity to remove it later but it’s easier to manage if it comes out at the start.
Use the spanner on the outermost spanner slots.
Cap the rear of the lens and turn it over. Remove the beauty ring. There are spanner slots on the beauty ring but a rubber cone is less harmful.
Note – on the F2 version of this lens the beauty ring is glued into place and not threaded.
The beauty ring will unscrew with even pressure applied using a rubber cone.
The filter ring needs to be removed next. This is retained by 4x JIS screws. Do not remove the screws visible in the cut outs at this stage. Extract only the filter ring retainer screws.
Set the focus ring to infinity. You need to make sure this stays there until you can get some measurements of the helicoils and also mark the helicoil positions.
On this lens getting the focus to stay in place was easy – the focus was very stiff – almost stuck in fact. On some copies the focus may be excessively loose.
The front lens group can now be removed. You will need a lens spanner for this. Use the spanner on the outermost slots only.
The front optical unit will now pull free. You will usually find at this point oil traces over much of the interior. Normally the inner optical surfaces will have oil haze on MC-X types although their diaphragms almost never suffer oil contamination.
And here is the big problem with the MC-X series. On every other Minolta lens the diaphragm is ‘keyed’ to a certain position which makes managing the lens quite easy. The MC-X series have floating diaphragms. In this case the diaphragm is held into its position by a circular retainer which is held by 4 screws. With the retainer removed the diaphragm is free to ‘float’ to any position. It gets worse – you can’t mark the position easily because the only adjacent parts are also able to rotate. Your choices are either make markings of absolutely EVERYTHING (relationship of diaphragm position to focus helicoil and also mark the focus helicoil entry and exit points and their relative depths) OR manage the lens later using a calibrated light source and a shutter tester capable of assessing exposure errors and using a working copy to compare with. This is why the MC-X series is not a lens for beginners.
To remove the diaphragm remove the four JIS screws that secure the retainer ring.
Here’s the retainer ring being removed. The diaphragm is now free to turn in either direction without respect to the aperture control ring.
With the retainer removed the diaphragm will simply pull free from the lens body.
If you were unable to extract the rear optical group earlier it will come out with the diaphragm which will allow you to apply some Isoprop to it to break down any threadlock. Be careful because the back of the diaphragm contains aperture control stop down lever which is quite fragile.
Now it’s time to get the rest of the lens to pieces. Start by removing the rear trim ring/cover. This is retained by three tiny slotted head grub screws.
WARNING – these are VERY small.
Here’s the rear cover being pulled away after the three grubs screws are removed.
Set the aperture control ring to f1.7
With the lens set to f1.7 you will be able to see the lens rear assembly retainer screws through the cut outs on the rear of the aperture control ring.
Set the lens to infinity focus before going further and keep checking that it hasn’t shifted as you go forward.
Remove the four JIS screws. These hold the rear of the lens to the body.
The rear portion of the lens will now separate from the body.
MC-X lenses also have another difference to any other Minolta manual focus lens. This screw on the side of the aperture control ring is an access point for the small ball bearing which provides the click stops for the aperture. You do not need to remove this screw unless you wish. You will need a very unique driver to extract it without damaging it. I use a driver designed for slotted Nikon lens screws.
With the screw removed you will find the standard 1.2mm bearing. The spring to hold the ball is also inside the screw body.
When reassembling this does provide an easier way to get the bearing back into position but it does require the use of a special screwdriver that has a vertical cut blade and is very thin but quite wide.
Looking inside the aperture control ring you will see this curved piece. This controls the opening of the diaphragm.
Unfortunately along with the diaphragm being free floating this part can also affect the diaphragm opening. If you wish to separate the rear portion of the lens getting this aligned on rebuilding will be very troublesome.
To remove the aperture control curve, turn the lens over and remove the two screws. Make sure you mark the position of the curve. It will be critical later.
Unless you really, REALLY need to remove this you are best advised to leave it alone. Getting the aperture right is hard enough without having to worry about getting this aligned as well.
The aperture control curve can now be manoeuvred out. Note its orientation.
The aperture control ring can now be removed from the lens body. When you do this take care as the small ball bearing can fly off. It’s best to do this in a large Tupperware box or a bucket to reduce the risk of losing the bearing.
If you did not remove the screw fitting earlier that retains the spring and the ball bearing, extract the spring now using a cocktail stick. The bearings are replaceable but the springs are not, so store the spring and the bearing safely. I use an old film container.
Remove the focus barrel by releasing the three JIS screws. Be careful as each screw has a very small washer underneath it.
With the screws removed the focus barrel will simply slip off.
It is assumed you set the lens to infinity focus at the start or at the checkpoint earlier
Measure the helicoil gaps and make a note. You need measurements between the inner (black/silver) helicoils and the brass helicoils plus the brass helicoil to the silver lens body.
You also need to mark their relative positions AND their exit points as they separate.
Remove the three screws that retain the focus helicoil lock tab.
The helicoils can now be unscrewed and cleaned.
With the lens almost completely stripped you can now clean all of the lens body work.
Unless you have issues with the diaphragm simply wipe its exterior surface clean and run a cotton bud around inside AVOIDING the aperture blades. Normally I would suggest stripping an oily diaphragm but the MC-X is such a nasty lens to work on I would most likely use a freon free spray degreaser and then soak in Isoprop.
The rest of the lens body parts can be cleaned with Isoprop or hot water and a mild detergent. When I service a lens EVERYTHING gets cleaned. For final finishing I flush all parts BUT NOT THE INNER HELICOIL AND DIAPHRAGM under cold water and then blow dry.
The helicoils and lens body thread for the outer helicoil are then chased out with cocktail sticks to ensure that all thread surfaces are free of dirt and contaminants. Finally make sure the helicoils are running smoothly without lubricants to assess if any threads are damaged. Very often people have seen You Tube videos and poured lighter fuel in the lens to get the focus moving. This is a fast fix but creates long term issues with excessive thread wear and as a result you may need extreme measures like a lapping compound to polish out any defects in the thread.
When reassembling do not over-tighten any screws. This lens can be awkward and you may end up disassembling. The name of the game is lightly tighten stuff down. Test the lens and if all is well go back and retighten screws after you are sure all is working well.
First lubricate the helicoils. I usually use Helimax XP for most Minolta lenses as it provides a perfect damping while retaining a good feel. It’s also able to work at both high and low temperatures and resists migration. The outer metal helicoil needs only a light coating while the inner helicoils needs a slightly thicker dose. Getting the feel right is a bit of witchcraft and comes with experience so you will need to experiment to get the feel right. The one good thing about the MCX series is they are not super fussy about dosing on the lubrication. An even thin coat on the brass outer helicoils and a slightly thicker coat on the aluminium inner helicoil will be fine.
When re-assembling the helicoils the name of the game is to get the helicoils at the same distances from each other and the body as you measured earlier and also aligned with the marks you made PLUS…
Getting a good alignment with the focus lock tab. Assuming you marked both helicoils with their infinity position and measured the distances correctly they should align at the locking tab position correctly. These screws can be tightened down if you are sure about the focus alignment
Refit the aperture control ring to the lens body. Note that there is a cut out in the aperture control ring that must align with a brass screw on the lens body. This acts as the end stop for the aperture control ring.
You will need to make sure this is aligned. You will need to replace the spring and ball bearing prior to this. Apply a little grease to the ball bearing to ‘glue’ it to the ring and then apply the ring at an angle to trap the bearing and the push the rest of the ring into place. This is the same procedure for most Minolta lenses. I didn’t get a picture of this but you can refer to any of the other Minolta lens guides on the site to get an idea of how to do this.
Refit the aperture control curve – notice how the silver stud on the aperture mechanism fits against the curve. You will need to move the sprung aperture part out of the way to get the curve in place.
The positioning of the curve is critical and will affect the lens aperture response.
The curves position is regulated by the two screws. If you made markings align as best as you can at this point…
Replace the screws that retain the curve. Don’t over-tighten these as the fixing point is plastic and it’s easy to strip the threads. You only need as much pressure as you can exert between thumb and forefinger on the screwdriver barrel.
Replace the focusing helicoils to the lens body. Note that the body has a cut out for the focus lock tab. These have to align.
With the aperture set to f1.7 and the lens helicoil focus tab correct orientated to the body cut out the fixing screw holes will be visible.
In the picture a cocktail stick is holding the hole position to the slot and blocking the aperture ring from turning out of position.
Replace the screws that retain the lens body. These can be done tightly but dont over tighten. Remember the screws holes are threaded into aluminium and it’s easy to strip threads out.
During the following phase keep your wits about you. You can’t have the rear of the lens capped so remember this because the fragile stop down lever is exposed and subject to breaking if you press down on the lens.
Note the cut out in the aperture lever (in the picture it’s just to the right side of the stop down lever on the rear of the lens).
The diaphragm control lever needs to be positioned into the cut out in the aperture lever.
Here is the diaphragm barrel being replaced. Unlike an MC series there is no flat on the barrel as an alignment point.
You can now see that by rotating the diaphragm barrel the diaphragm will open and close. You now need to tune this. At wide open (f1.7) the aperture blades should be just slightly out of sight behind the diaphragm mask. At minimum aperture (f16) the aperture should close down. Across the range the aperture should open/close evenly with each change of aperture stop.
This is a particularly tough job with the MC-X series because both the position of the diaphragm barrel AND the positioning of the aperture control curve will affect the aperture opening. Without a known good lens to compare with this is a very hard job. Even with a working lens it can still be a painful process requiring a lot of patience. It’s a very difficult lens to work with/on which is why I would advise people not to mess with the MC-X series.
I managed getting the aperture right by getting a close visual approximation and then loosely fitting the optical elements. By fitting the lens to a known good camera with reliable shutter speeds I am able to test exposure error at each setting and by seeing the results. I can fine tune the lens. Even with experience and test equipment the MC-X series is no fun to work on.
Assuming you are happy with the aperture/diaphragm performance you can now refit the diaphragm retainer…
FIT THE REAR CAP TO THE LENS NOW – YOU DONT WANT TO BUST THE STOP DOWN LEVER!
…and replace the 4x JIS screws to hold it in place.
Replace the rear trim ring with its grub screws. The rings fixing position is not specific but it’s best if you can to line it up with the original positioning. Normally there will be marks on the lens body where the grub screws were. If not don’t worry and just refit as is.
Replace the front optical unit after giving its inner surface a clean and blowing out the lens interior. Do not use harsh chemicals – the MC-X series can have very soft inner coatings. A very dilute Isoprop, breath and a fine lint free cloth gently applied is all that will be needed in most cases.
Unless there are issues like fungus it is best not to disassemble the optical units. There is always a small amount of dust from when they were manufactured and trying to get rid of it usually just means moving the dust around or adding some fresh dust. Tighten the unit down with a lens spanner – it only needs to be hand tight plus a small tweak.
Replace the rear optical unit after giving its inner surface a clean.
Mount the lens to a known good camera and bring the lens to infinity focus. Use a split image viewfinder and get infinity by focusing on something distant. I normally use two radio towers which are around 8 miles away. You can focus the lens using the brass outer helicoil. DO NOT WIND THE LENS TOO FAR OUT or you will risk disconnecting the inner helicoil from the lock tab.
With the lens at infinity replace the focus barrel so that the infinity mark is aligned with the index mark.
Refit the focus barrel retainer screws with their washers. As ever do not over-tighten.
Replace the filter ring and refit the retaining screws.
Replace the beauty ring. Take care as the beauty ring is plastic and it’s easy to cross thread this and jam it. A rubber cone works best for this.
Assuming all has gone well – give yourself some congratulations, have a cup of tea (or the beverage of choice) and get ready to get some great pictures.
The MC-X Series are a tough challenge but I hope this guide will have at least eased some of the way.
This Minolta MC-X Series Lens Repair Guide article can always be improved. If you have any questions and or comments we would love to hear them in the comments below. Mel.
Mel is one of the driving forces behind High 5 Cameras and writes all our articles.
Starting serious photography back in 1972. Over the years she got to shoot film with most of the major brands in 35mm and large format as both a studio photographer and content provider for websites in the early life of the web. These days she is rediscovering photography and has become the GOTO person for knowledge on camera repair advice.
How to clean a focus screen: – One of those things that comes up endlessly on forums for classic cameras is ‘How do I clean a focus screen?’ to save my fingers and to try and antidote a lot of bad advice out there I am creating a handy article that I can now link to each time this comes up.
OK before we get started with cleaning the screen lets take a quick look at some of the issues.
WHY DOES A FOCUS SCREEN GET DIRTY?
Well over time like with anything dust builds up. Added to that many of the people asking for help are using cameras that that are 40+ years old. These may be suffering from failing mirror bumpers and light seals. Check out the guide to replacing these HERE.
Sadly the decaying foam from the mirror bumper (and sometimes from other internal foam) leaves fragments of foam and nasty gunk on the focus screen which won’t easily blow off.
HOW EASY IS IT TO CLEAN A FOCUS SCREEN?
Well how tough it is to clean depends a great deal on the camera design, where the dust and dirt is and how dirty the screen is.
Generally speaking it’s best to clean as little as possible but if that dust and dirt in the viewfinder really is distracting then you may well have no choice but to clean.
How hard the cleaning is depends greatly on the camera design and here’s why….
On some cameras the focus screen is removable and is a single piece unit (eg Olympus OM-1, Minolta XD7, Minolta X-x00), on some the focus screen is a two-piece unit but removable (eg Nikon F, Nikon F2). On others the focus screen is either a single part fixed in place (Canon AE-1, Pentax ME) or, on older cameras, a two part system fixed in place (Minolta SRT, Canon FTb and older Pentax cameras).
Olympus OM-1 – Easy. The screen can be dropped down and removed by simply pressing a lever.
Minolta X-700 – Harder. The screen comes out but its tricky to do
Pentax ME Super – Impossible. Camera needs dismantling.
To clean both top and bottom of the screen the screen needs to come out but it’s possible, with care to clean the most common dust and dirt from the bottom of the screen visible inside the camera with the lens removed even if the screen is non-removable.
You need to consult your own camera manual to decide what is possible.
TYPES OF FOCUS SCREENS
A single part screen is usually just a thin plastic screen that’s fitted under the prism. On a two part screen the screen comprises a Fresnel lens and a condenser lens. Why the differences? Principally down to the advances in production technology for making these. A single piece screen looks flat but is in fact slightly curved as the condenser is part of the Fresnel.
How to clean a focus screen: A two part focus screen with a condenser and Fresnel in a carrier and a single part screen.
All Fresnel screens and single part screens have two different sides– a shiny side that’s quite hard and faces the mirror and a matt side with the Fresnel grooves which faces the prism.
The side facing the mirror is the hard, shiny side. This is the side you see when you take a lens off and look inside the camera. It’s best cleaned sparingly – a blower brush at most. If something is stuck to it breath on the screen and VERY GENTLY use a cotton bud to remove the particle.
If you are super careful you can apply some distilled water using a cotton bud but be very gentle. The screen is easily marked and NEVER use any chemicals. Some focus screens can cope with chemicals like Isopropyl on the hard shiny side, others will simply melt. The matte Fresnel side will ALWAYS be ruined by applying chemicals.
ISSUES WITH DIRT ON THE TOP SURFACE OF THE SCREEN
On a camera with a non-removable screen the top part is semi sealed. Whether stuff gets on the top of the screen is really down to the cameras design. Minolta SRTs for instance can be contaminated as interior light seals crumble. Others may allow dust to gather behind the screen.
For cameras with a non removable screen how tough it is to clean the top surface of the screen comes down to how tough it is to get the prism out to get access to the top surface of the screen. Some older cameras (like the Minolta SRT and Canon FTB) present some challenges but later electronic cameras can present king sized headaches as they often require their flex circuit boards to be removed to get access to the prism OR the mirror box to come out. Typical culprits for this are the Canon AE-1 and Pentax ME and ME Super and the Nikon F-301 (although the Nikon is very well sealed so getting stuff on the top of the screen is unlikely – at least I have never seen it happen).
You need to be careful with the prism out of the camera. Older cameras usually have their meter needles in top of the screen and these can be easily damaged by excessive blowing or worse someone ramming into the meter needle or meter follower with a cotton bud.
Decaying seals around the focus screen will cause contamination of the top of the screen.
A Minolta SRT. It’s relatively easy to get access to the top of the screen but caution – the meter needle and follower are VERY fragile.
CLEANING A SINGLE PART SCREEN
So lets assume you can get the screen out for cleaning and its easily removable and a single part screen. Your cameras user manual will be the best source of information on this. If you dont have one to hand check out the Mike Butkus site HERE (and dont forget to donate a dollar – Mike is a Saint and worthy of your support).
CAUTIONARY NOTES HERE
NEVER, EVER use Isoprop on a focus screen. You may, just possibly, if you are beloved of God, get away with it on the shiny side but you never will on the matt Fresnel side – the screen will melt and be ruined. Some focus screens are almost impossible to find spares for (Pentax MX and Minolta XD7 for instance) so BE CAREFUL. I have seen ammonia recommended but having once trashed a rare screen by using chemicals I am loathe to ever risk it again.
ALWAYS hold the screen by its edges and minimise contact with its surface. Don’t lay the screen down on hard surfaces or be inclined to pick or push at dirt on the screen with your fingers. If you muct put the screen down then use either a clean sheet of paper or a soft lint free cloth.
My regime is to slowly step up and only move up a notch if absolutely necessary, a slight imperfection is a lot better than no screen at all.
How to clean a focus screen: A decent rocket type blower and a sable brush are recommended
First off blow the screen with a rocket blower – this will take dust off. Don’t bother with one of those tiny blower brushes so beloved of Amazon and eBay camera care kits – get yourself a decent rocket blower like in the picture.
Use a duck feather gently to brush with (Eugene Pate at LearnCameraRepair swears by this but I have been unable to get a duck to stay still long enough). I occasionally use a very fine and very soft sable brush. Absolutely don’t use anything except a super fine sable. Many brushes will be too harsh and you will risk scratching the screen.
Assuming dirt which can’t be removed with blowing or gentle brushing– put the screen under a cold water tap, hold it only by its edges as even finger pressure can cause the matt side of the screen to deform and this will create dull spots in the view. Use cold water only and don’t use excessive pressure from the tap.
Don’t rub or press on a focus screen. Dry with you cold air rocket blower – using distilled water as a final finish before blowing dry will give a nice look and avoid any streaks as the water contains no impurities.
By the way distilled water without impurities is ABSOLUTELY DISGUSTING to drink – don’t let marketing idiots tell you that their Pura Hydro 100% water is amazing because any 100% pure water is HORRIBLE to drink. It’s the impurities like dissolved salts that make water taste acceptable.
If the cold-water approach didn’t work here’s the final answer…
Apply a blob of low Ph dishwashing liquid to the screen. Agitate the blob with your fingers which have been pre-softened in hot soapy water. The trick is to let your fingers ride on top of the blob as you roll the blob of liquid around on the screen. Your fingers don’t touch the screen they ride on the blob like a hovercraft. Flush off with cold water and then distilled water and blow clean with a cold air blower.
I use this as it’s a similar approach to cleaning telescope mirrors which are even more fragile than focus screens – they can’t even have low Ph dishwashing liquid and have to be done with pure soap suds which really is a pain. Before I did camera repair I did astronomy equipment repair and telescope mirrors and lenses are figured to wavelengths of light and a fair bit tougher to deal with than most focus screens.
TWO PART FOCUS SCREENS
For screens with a two-part construction there are additional issues. You can’t put them under a cold water tap as water will leak into the air gap between the screens. Normally that’s not an issue as you will only need to blow the top and bottom of the screen with a blower brush. Normally the screens are fitted into a carrier. If stuff has gotten between the Fresnel and the condenser it’s down to the way the screen was manufactured as to how to manage it.
A Minolta SRT is relatively simple and the screen is composed of a Fresnel and condenser held together with teeny screws and spacers. Unfortunately to fully remove an SRT screen you need to disassemble a large part of the camera. However very often the dirt is only on the top surface and removing the prism of a Minolta SRT or Canon FTb is relatively easy though not advised for the beginner. Be very careful when you manage this because the meter needles and followers are VERY fragile.
A Minolta SRT focus screen assembly. To dis-assemble the screen requires a large amount of work as much of the cameras internal parts have to be removed.
Anatomy of a two part focus screen – in practice they can be harder to strip down.
Canon FTb – A camera with a two part screen and its even harder to deal with than the Minolta SRT.
A Nikon F has an easily removable two parts screen which is mounted in a carrier and is relatively easy to dis-assemble but very often the two screens are bonded by a thin tape. The tape has glue on it and of course the glue can decompose and leak into the gap between the screens. It’s a nasty situation. To be fair I have only seen this once or twice. If that’s you – then you are out of luck because I have yet to find a way to fix that and suspect there’s nothing much to be done except pay a scalper on eBay for a replacement screen. The Nikon F, F2 and the Canon F1 all have two part screens but they are easily removable and will only usually need a blow or brush. It’s rare to have to separate the screens.
If you do have to go as far as screen separation NEVER mess with the condenser screen- its usually a very soft acrylic and will scuff and scratch easily. Use cold water only, breathe on it and VERY GENTLY wipe with a cotton bud. The Fresnel can be treated as per the single part screen cleaning already described. BUT – and in tales of derring do like fixing a focus screen there is ALWAYS a but…
Getting a screen back together without any dust creeping in can be exhausting. Originally these were factory assembled and although they weren’t done in a clean room by todays standards they were assembled by very sharp assembly line workers – how they did it is a mystery (witchcraft I suspect). You need a clean environment, a blower brush and the patience of Job will not suffice – you need the combined patience of every Saint in heaven….. but, it can be done.
Thankfully most two part screens almost never need to come apart.
To check you got the screen dust free use a jewellers loupe and a good light – at a pinch the eyepiece from the viewfinder will work if it’s removable without too much fuss. Remember the eyepiece of the viewfinder is a magnifying glass so any imperfection in the screen will be more visible in the camera through the viewfinder than to your naked eyeballs.
FINALLY
Final cautionary note – I periodically see people suggesting putting some low tack tape on the screen. It’s a bad idea generally to clean a focus screen this way because the Fresnel side is very finely cut and as already stated you can flatten the grooves with not much effort. The low tack tape idea though can work in extreme situations but it’s really the thing to use when nothing else has worked and it’s that or the power of prayer.
If you have had to remove a prism to get to the top of the screen you may as well clean the prism surfaces as dust, if its on the top of the focus screen, will usually be on the prism as well.
The prism shouldn’t need much cleaning usually – at most breathe and a microfibre cloth or a soft cotton bud. I use a superfine cloth from Baader Optics. If it has glue residue from decaying light seals I use a very dilute Isopropyl solution.
As with the focus screen Don’t rub the prism it can scuff easily in most cameras – it’s a very finely ground bit of glass and needs careful handling.
For cameras with easily removable screens when the screen comes out you will have access to the base of the prism and you can clean using just breath and a cotton bud but be very gentle. So now you know how to clean a focus screen.
It can be done – this is the view through a viewfinder of a Minolta SRT before cleaning…
Mel is one of the driving forces behind High 5 Cameras and writes all our articles.
Starting serious photography back in 1972. Over the years she got to shoot film with most of the major brands in 35mm and large format as both a studio photographer and content provider for websites in the early life of the web. These days she is rediscovering photography and has become the GOTO person for knowledge on camera repair advice.
Film is expensive: – The increasing cost of film is often much complained about on film photography forums with people endlessly binding on about how it’s daft to keep shooting when film costs are so exorbitant. Devotees of the art (craft, science, technology – pic your preferred nomenclature) seem to be constantly complaining about the price of film.
Recently I ran into a very long diatribe from a certain Mr Leas. The full text of this is towards the end of this article but it starts with a complaint that just as film cameras are becoming more affordable the price of film is going skywards.
He wrote to complain about the rising cost of living, inflationary pressures and points out that until quite recently film was rather inexpensive but now, as a result of rising prices, photographers may be restricted – shoot less, be more selective about what they shoot, stop bracketing shots etc.
None of this will be unfamiliar to anyone who has paid even scant attention to film forums and, the occasional plea for sanity because, at the end of the day it really isn’t THAT expensive, tends to get ignored in the welter of people crying over increased costs.
What makes Mr Leas diatribe so interesting though is that it was written in 1980! 20 years before digital became a significant force and when the film photography industry was at its zenith. It really does seem as if there is nothing new under the sun doesn’t it? Moaning about stuff is, I have long suspected, a very human trait.
I bought a pile of old Amateur Photographer magazines, mostly for some early test results on cameras and also to validate a feeling that film really wasn’t that much more expensive today than it was back in the halcyon 70s and 80s – or was it? Having done some rough math and been shouted at on forums with people’s hazy recollections of when film was handed out free (not really but some people do have a faulty recollection for sure) about how it WAS more expensive today than ever before I thought I’d do some research and find the truth rather than rely on my own (possibly faulty) memory. Peoples recollections are often faulty and people of a certain age tend to carp on about how when they were young everything was less expensive. I do it myself at times as I am of that certain age when you start boring strangers with how everything was better in the good old days.
So putting down my repair tools and putting my two bladed propellor research hat on I combed through several magazines from the 1980s. Now this is trickier than you may think because many films are out of production, some films have changed formulas and some films have been replaced by later versions of the original film so it’s rather tough to draw direct comparisons.
In the end I settled for those old standbys – Ilford, Kodak and Fuji. I took sample prices, averaged them out and then I ran the 1980s prices through the Bank of Englands inflation calculator to see what the price would look like today and then compared that to current online prices.
Here’s what I found…
For the black and white shooter It’s gotten a bit more expensive but not so much you’d really notice and there are alternatives….
Ilford FP4 (36 Exposures) Black and White
In 1980 a roll of FP4 would cost somewhere between £1.50 and £1.43 but the lower price is from mail order so you would be stuck with postage costs. The price in a retail outlet would have been £1.50 – you could get it cheaper if you were prepared to buy 10 rolls mail order and the price would then go down to. £1.24 per roll. The BoE inflation calculator gives a price (based on the £1.50 figure which is more typical of retail shops) as costing £6.12 in todays money. The actual price you would pay today would be £6.50 based on the best deal you could get online. But, you could chip that price down by buying 3 or 10 rolls from online outlets. Pricing on all film stock is somewhat skewed by eBay and Amazon scalpers who are quick to ride any trend.
RESULT– its gone up by a whopping 38p – a 6.2% Increase
If 38p is likely to drive you into penury then you’d best start tightening your belt and sell that classic camera. I’ll take it off your hands just let me know where to come to pick it up.
Ilford HP5 (36 Exposures)Black and White
In 1980 you would have been paying the same for HP5 as FP4 – so £1.50 a roll. All the same provisos as FP4 apply and the BoE calculator gives a price today of £6.12 – Same as FP4 BUT you would now be paying £6.79. It’s slightly more expensive than FP4 but the same applies to bulk deals. You could buy 3 or 10 rolls and equalise the price.
Like FP4 its slightly more expensive but you need to consider the volumes for film sales have gone down. Like any commodity the price rises as the production volume falls. Considering the comparison is between a time when film was being produced in vast bulk and today where it’s a speciality product the price rises are really not that much.
RESULT– its gone up by 67p which is a nearly 11% increase
If you really do feel you can’t afford an extra 50p a roll on a bulk buy then there are excellent alternative films like Kosmo Foto, Kentmere, Orwo and plenty of others.
The cost of colour film has gone up and for some of the exotics films prices really have shifted but there are still good deals out there.
Kodacolor II 400 (36 Exposures) Colour
It’s not around anymore but I wanted a sample of colour prices to compare with. Its nearest relative would be Kodak Gold 400 these days. So how does the pricing look?
Back in 1980 a retail outlet would charge you £2.25 for a roll. Mail order would be charging anywhere between £1.72 and £2.26 depending on volume. Just like with the Ilford films some of the mail order companies could trim the price if you ordered 10 rolls. Running that price through the BoE calculator give you a price of £9.18 in todays money. You could acquire a roll online these days for around £10 but you could get it cheaper if you bought in bulk. I found one store that would haircut the price to around £5 plus postage if you bought 10 rolls.
So just like the Ilford films Kodak colour gone up marginally BUT if you were happy to shell out for 10 rolls the cost of film might actually be cheaper!
RESULT– It’s more expensive with a 9% rise equivalent to almost an entire pound
Shocking, I mean how can anyone who’ just shelled out £200+ on a classic camera possibly be expected to find an extra £1! On the other hand you can shop around and buy bulk and actually get it for LESS than it cost back then.
Fuji Color 400 (36 Exposures) Colour
Fuji was hard to get a handle on. Believe it or not very few dealers were selling Fuji in 1980, at least from the adverts in photography magazines. The only dealer I could find in 1980 with an advert was selling a 36 roll of Fuji Color 400 for £1.95. Goodness that was cheap back then – barely more than a black and white roll. Possibly because most Japanese companies when they enter a market price very aggressively to force out competitors and build a base of users. The Fuji price was clearly undercutting Kodak back in the 1980s. Putting that number into the BoE calculator would give a price today of £7.95 but as we all know you’d be lucky to lay hands on Fuji 400 Color today for less than £14.99.
Theres two reasons for that. The first is having captured the market and become the darling of colour films Fuji upped the price back in the ‘used to be’. It became quite an expensive film in time – more expensive that Kodak in the late 1980s. The second reason is today the eBay scalpers are hard at work. It’s in short supply which means people are charging over the odds. Before the axe fell when Fuji moved production and subsequently disrupted supply (and said they were quitting film – before they woke up and smelled the acetate) I bulk bought Fuji Superia 400 at £9.99 a year ago- only £2 more expensive (equivalent to a 21% increase). I don’t doubt it will get back there again once Fuji start fulfilling on volumes again now that they have moved production to the USA.
RESULT– It’s more expensive with a 21% rise equivalent to £2 if you could bulk buy otherwise it really has gone ballistic with around 100% price rise if you buy online from a scalper assuming you can even get it
Fuji was often the more expensive option even back in the Golden Age. But you can trim the price with a bulk buy or use the more modern Kodak films which are really very good.
Its not all bleak… there are new arrivals like Kosmo Fotos Agent Shadow which is really excellent when handled well.
Mr Leas writes…(March 1980)
That letter in full as promised is below– tell me if this isn’t the same song that the modern film photographer often sings at every opportunity… read on for how bad things could be in the good old bad old days and if you want to see how film prices have fluctuated over a large time scale read Mike Eckmans article which is far more exhaustive than this one and covers film prices from the dawn of film photography.
It seems ironic that just at the time when the purchase price of many of the most desirable cameras has dropped considerably (for example, Nikon EM, originally advertised at £150 has been advertised at under £100) (don’t we all wish that were so today – Mel) the cost of films and printing papers has had to rise dramatically.
Because of the greatly increased price of silver, couple with inflation etc, we all face the setback of very likely having to reduce the actual numbers of pictures we can afford to take with our super lower-priced cameras. I do not yet know by how much35mm films are due to rise but I have been informed that the printing paper I uses is going up by 50% following a 20% rise just before Christmas.
This letter was sent in March – see things aren’t so bad after all. Here we are today moaning about piddling 3% rises from Ilford– Mel.
All told, I expect to pay double what was charged just over a year ago. Since so many other costs are also rising steeply it seems inevitable that many people will have to cut back on their photography, even if you go in for bulk buying. Until recently most enthusiasts could regard the materials required to make pictures as being reasonably inexpensive. If you found a really good subject you might shoot off several frames at various apertures and from several angles, to obtain the best possible result. Generally when carrying a camera there was no particular feeling of restraint when subjects that appealed turned up. Obviously this doesn’t apply to everyone, for some people the cost of film has always been a restraining factor, but I am speaking in general terms. So, too, when working in the darkroom, the cost of paper was not such that one felt unable to use several sheets if necessary to obtain a first-rate result and of course many sheets are used as test strips. Now, economies will have to be made unless by some means we can all raise our incomes sufficiently (some hopes!). But this may not be altogether a bad thing. It is very tempting, enjoying an outing with ones camera, to shoot a little carelessly rather than take extra care to sum up each subjects merits, the quality of the light etc. (Mr Leas, if he was around today would do well to read my ‘Being There’ articles about just that – Mel). Now there should be a greater incentive to be choosy about subjects, to take the time to find the best angles, not to make do with indifferent lighting and to ensure exposure will be spot on rather than go in for too much bracketing. All this of course to save on precious film. No one would welcome these steep price increases (least of all those with film gobbling auto winders) but they may well lead to greater care over choosing subject matter and matters concerning technique. So it could be that standards of photography actually rise through a little imposed restraint!
Conclusion So there you are – film IS more expensive, but as you can see from the letter dated March 1980 from Mr Leas, it always was. People were moaning about it 40 years ago, but it’s hardly a huge additional cost in the way that people may have you believe. Yes – some of the exotic super professional films have gotten expensive – they always were though but I’d rather they were pricey than gone altogether which is the less palatable option. On the sunny side there are new films coming out all the time, Kodak recently took on another 350 staff to meet the demand, Harman have launched Phoenix (a completely new colour film) and Fuji did eventually wake up and smell the acetate and moved production to the US and hopefully will soon get back in their stride.
I do find it odd though that many modern day film shooters moan and complain about film costs while paying out for expensive gear, buying vast collections of classics and then sitting in what passes for a coffee shop gulping down hot brown water that they just paid twice the price of a roll of film for. There seems a disconnect, possibly even a sense of entitlement, that having acquired a classic camera on the cheap they shouldn’t have to pay for film. It’s a bit like buying a classic 1960s car and expecting to pay 1960s prices for your petrol.
Here’s another thought – if film really is too expensive for you that’s even more reason to shoot with a reliable and serviced camera. Mr Leas makes a plea in his letter that just maybe people will be more selective about what they shoot. Frankly you always should be – if your just blatting film and hoping then digital really is for you.
With the increasing prices the usual prophets of doom would have you believe that film photography will die. I don’t think it will anytime soon but without a new film camera coming to market and a kickstart to the whole film photography zeitgeist I very much believe film will eventually just fade away. There simply wont be the cameras to use it in sadly – production volumes for cameras were never as high as people think and many marques and models are now simply impossible to repair. Many will be destroyed by todays throw away society and the pool of viable cameras will shrink without new products coming to market.
Let’s all keep our finger crossed and hope Pentax are successful in their venture into reduxing a film camera for todays market which may be the best hope to see film make a come back but as you can see it would be unlikely to make film less expensive as its already pretty close to its 1980 pricing levels which, given the vastly reduced demand, is itself something of a minor miracle that we should all be grateful for.
Mel is one of the driving forces behind High 5 Cameras and writes all our articles.
Starting serious photography back in 1972. Over the years she got to shoot film with most of the major brands in 35mm and large format as both a studio photographer and content provider for websites in the early life of the web. These days she is rediscovering photography and has become the GOTO person for knowledge on camera repair advice.
A step by step repair and servicing guide for the much loved Minolta MD Rokkor 45mm f2.
The MD Rokkor 45mm f2 lens was, believe it or not, a low cost budget lens that Minolta primarily fitted to the budget XG series of cameras. The lens has now become something of a hyped up item thanks to people adapting them for digital. In actual practice they are solid if unremarkable lens for most film users. Some people find the 45mm focal length more useful than a standard 50mm and the lens is very compact being almost a pancake design but personally I am not a fan of this lens.
Unfortunately, like many MD series lenses the 45mm f2 can suffer haze issues caused by vaporising oil from its helicoils. Very often the focus feel is either over firm, very loose or gritty. These conditions are almost always a sure sign of lubricants vaporising over time. On the plus side its very rare to ever see an MD series lens with the dreaded oiled up aperture diaphragm.
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Most Minolta MD series lenses are very simple to service and there is a general guide for the 50mm versions here. Most MD’s are very tolerant and kind to beginners. This is not the case with the 45mm which can be very fussy with respect to its focusing helicoils.
You will need some small containers for screws. I use ice cube trays for my work and use a sharpie pen to scribble as to which screws are in which cell of the container.
The lens used for this guide was in very poor overall condition with a very stiff focus feel and extreme haze. In addition the rubber grip had vulcanised badly and no amount of chemicals or heat would ever have returned it to the correct size for the focus barrel. In the pictures you can se just how much dirt and general muck there was in the lens at the start. -this is quite typical for MD lenses sold online.
Read through the whole guide before starting so you know what you are doing and always be mindful of what you are doing when you start work. The most common beginner mistake is to press down on the lens and forget that the opposite side is exposed, this can lead to snapped off aperture levers or wrecked front optics. Keep the lens capped on the opposite side to the side you are working. Work slowly and carefully and dont rush. There are no Olympic sports involving the fastest lens rebuild and a rushed job will lead to mistakes.
Relax, have fun and take your time.
You will need the following tools and parts to carry out repair and servicing of the MD Rokkor 45mm f2
First step is to remove the beauty ring. On most short focal length MD series this is best done with a rubber cone.
The beauty ring does have spanner slots for a lens spanner but its best to avoid using a lens spanner if at all possible as the beauty ring is a relatively soft plastic which can be disfigured easily.
You can see the focus ring rubber grip is missing as the grip was so badly out of shape it would just fall off the lens. I’ll show you how to deal with that later.
As you work on the front of the lens remember to keep the back of the lens capped to avoid damage.
Remove the filter ring. This is secured with three small screws. Use a JIS driver here to avoid damage to the screws heads.
Now remove the three JIS screws that secure the front element group.
You can see the general poor state of the lens here with accumulated muck and dirt hiding behind the beauty ring.
The front element group can now be lifted off. Store this somewhere safe. Don’t bother cleaning it just yet.
You may end up having to do a partial rebuild so leave cleaning the glass until everything else is ready.
Note: This lens can suffer very badly from oil vapour and you may find the front optical unit is stuck due to suction. Use a cocktail stick to create a small gap between the optical units surround and the lens body.
Set the focus ring to infinity. You need to make sure this stays there until you can get some measurements of the helicoils and also mark the helicoil positions.
On this lens getting the focus to stay in place was easy – the focus was very stiff – almost stuck in fact. On some copies the focus may be excessively loose.
Remove the three screws around the edge of the focus barrel. The barrel will then simply lift off the lens. Before you do this double check the lens is still at infinity focus.
You will find the focus barrel is a two part piece. The main plastic barrel with its rubber grip and a metal insert. These can be separated easily for cleaning. The metal insert is often stuck down by accumulated dirt and oil.
With the focus barrel removed you need to measure the gap between the helicoils.
The outer helicoil has a lip running round it and I usually measure the gap using a selection of jewellers drivers. When the tip of the driver is a good fit into the gap thats a fix on how the helicoil needs setting on reassembly. It’s super critical to get this right with the 45mm f2. If you don’t theres an excellent chance that on reassembly you will need too much back focus on one of the helicoils and cause the diaphragm to jam.
The helicoil gaps are circa – OUTER=1.5mm – INNER=2.5mm
Next job is to mark the helicoils at their infinity focus point. I use a scriber to put a small scratch into the helicoil rings. Heres the outer helicoil marked with respect to the focus index mark.
The inner helicoil is also marked for infinity with respect to the focus index mark.
It’s good practice to mark these and also mark the point at which the helicoils separate later on. On this lens so long as you obtained good measurements earlier of the helicoil distances and you have marked the alignment points you can skip marking the helicoil thread entry points.
The lens is quite simple and there will only be a very limited number of options where the helicoils align. Its relatively simple if you don’t get the correct entry point for the threads to see its wrong. You’ll see why later on.
It’s now time to turn the lens over and start work on the rear of the lens.
Remove the 4x JIS screws on the mounting plate.
The lens mount will now simply pull free. Be careful not to remove the the aperture control ring. It has a small spring and ball bearing which can fly off and get lost.
On the 45mm f2 MD Rokkor the ball bearing and spring are located on the top of the lens near the f stop index markings. This makes it quite easy to handle for reassembly.
You can see the small detents that the bearing clicks into just to the left of the arrow.
You can also see more dirt and mess inside the lens. This is fairly typical for most MDs.
Cup the rear of the lens with its aperture in your hand and pull the body of the lens away to seperate the aperture ring. Immediately examine your hands and the lens to locate the bearing. It will sometimes fly off and its very tiny at 1.2mm and easily lost.
If you are nervous about this bit then use a large Tupperware box or a bucket to put your hands in while you separate the aperture ring.
Note this pic was from an earlier lens which looks a little different.
On this lens the oil contamination was so bad that the helicoil lubricant had turned into something like mud which stuck a lot of parts together. As a result the aperture ring ball bearing stayed with the ring. You can get an idea how small this is (1.2mm) here it is against a toothpick.
And here is the tiny spring which forces the bearing into the aperture click stop detents.
I tease this out with a cocktail stick – the bearing and spring are stored in an old film container until needed during reaasembly.
It’s safer to remove the spring to reduce any risk of loss while cleaning the lens parts.
We can now remove the rear optical unit. On most MDs you would take this out earlier but the 45mm is slightly different. It is wiser to leave it in place until the aperture ring has been dealt with.
Remove the three JIS screws that retain the plate surrounding the rear optical unit.
Note how the plate has a cut out for the aperture control lever.
Remove the plate.
The rear optical unit can now be removed. Store this safely.
Do not clean it yet – it’s best to leave the optical surfaces to last to reduce the amount of cleaning they are subjected to.
The focus lock tab can now be removed. If you are going to hit trouble with an MD lens this is where it will be. These screws were often glued into place by the factory. You absolutely need the correct sized JUS screwdriver for these or you will round the heads off.
If the lock tab screws don’t shift easily use a soldering iron to heat the screw head. Once the screw head is hot the glue should give way. Be careful while doing this as the lens is mostly plastic which will melt.
With no lock tab securing the helicoils you can now simply unscrew the inner and outer helicoils from the lens body.
Here is the outer helicoil (silver) and the inner (black) helicoil separated.
The inner helicoil contains the diaphragm mechanism so needs to be handled with extreme care during cleaning.
On this lens the lubricant had turned into something like tar and it was an awful job to get it clean.
With the lens almost completely stripped you can now clean all of the lens body work. Note that the rear element group, diaphragm and inner helicoil are all one piece. You are advised not to take this to pieces.
To clean the inner helicoil with it’s built its diaphragm I use cotton wool balls to take off the worst of the mess on the threads and then use a cotton wool ball dampened with Isoprop to slowly work away the rest of the mess. Once its dry I use a a soft old tooth brush to clean away any remains. You need to be very careful then mess does not get into the diaphragm mechanism so work very slowly and methodically with this piece.
The diaphragm of the MD series almost never gums up so it is rare you would ever need to take this part and I don’t recommend stripping it down for fun.
The rest of the lens body parts can be cleaned with Isoprop or hot water and a mild detergent. When I service a lens EVERYTHING gets cleaned. For final finishing I flush all parts BUT NOT THE INNER HELICOIL AND DIAPHRAGM under cold water and then blow dry.
Be very careful when cleaning the lens mount part as it contains springs and levers. I use Isoprop and a soft toothbrush for this.
The helicoils and lens body thread for the outer helicoil are then chased out with cocktail sticks to ensure that all thread surfaces are free of dirt and contaminants. Finally make sure the helicoils are running smoothly without lubricants to assess if any threads are damaged. Very often people have seen You Tube videos and poured lighter fuel in the lens to get the focus moving. This is a fast fix but creates long term issues with excessive thread wear and as a result you may need extreme measures like a lapping compound to polish out any defects in the threads.
Repairing the rubber gripon the 45mm f2 MD Rokkor
On this lens the rubber grip was in a terrible shape. It was so loose that if you tipped the lens nose down the grip would simply fall off.
Sometimes it is possible to reattach a slightly loose grip with double sided tape or use boiling water to shrink the grip. Some people swear by a soak in Naptha. These fixes will work if a grip is slightly loose but in this case there was no magic solution to shrink the grip by around 1/4 inch. Plus the grip had flattened out in its width so would not easily fit the focus barrel cut out for it.
The radical fix was to cut three of the diamond patterns out to reduce the grips circumference. I went slowly cutting one section at a time until the fit was suitably tight.
Once the fit was ok the barrel and rubber grip were cleaned and I used Evo-Stick Serious Glue to reapply the grip stretching it into place. Normally I would use a contact adhesive but I wanted time to make sure I could stretch the rubber into place and securely clamp it.
After the glue had set fully the grip was cleaned with a nice gritty toothpaste and soft toothbrush. Toothpaste can do wonders for rubber. The grittiness in it removes dirt and the oxidised layer and the menthol oil helps to rejuvenate the rubber.
The join was placed on the base of the lens to make it inconspicuous but in truth unless you knew the join was there and where to look you’d never see it after this repair.
When reassembling do not over-tighten any screws. This lens can be awkward and you may end up disassembling. The name of the game is lightly tighten stuff down. Test the lens and if all is well go back and retighten screws after you are sure all is working well.
First lubricate the helicoils. I usually use Helimax XP for Minolta MD series as it provides a perfect damping while retaining a good feel. It’s also able to work at both high and low temperatures and resists migration. The outer metal helicoil needs only a light coating while the inner helicoils needs a slightly thicker dose. Getting the feel right is a bit of witchcraft and comes with experience so you will need to experiment to get the feel right.
The name of the game is to get the helicoils at the same distances from each other and the body as you measured earlier and also aligned with the marks you made PLUS…
…making sure that with the distances set correctly and aligned with the marks you made before disassembly the focus tab fitting is in the right position.
The inner helicoil has to align with the focus tab position with the measurements and the marks.
Note: In this picture the assembly had progressed a bit and the aperture ring and rear optical block has been installed.
A quick test of whether things are close with regards to the helicoils is to drop the focus barrel on to the lens at this point and place the filter ring on top. If its set right the filter ring outer edge will sit just below the top of the focus ring.
Once the front optics unit is installed the edge of the filter ring will be almost level with the edge of the focus barrel when the lens is at infinity.
Note: In this picture the aperture ring is back in place – this is just to show the relationship between the filter ring and the focus barrel.
Replace the small spring back into the aperture ring if it was removed earlier. Apply a small blob of lithium grease (Helimax XP will do) onto the top of the spring and apply the ball bearing. The grease will hold the bearing in place. Apply a small smear of grease to the detents on the lens body. This will give the aperture ring a smooth feel.
Before doing this establish how the aperture ring fits to the body. Different Rokkors and MD have differing fits. The 45mm is relatively easy as the bearing and the index marks are in more or less the same place at the top of the lens but some Minolta lenses will only allow the aperture ring to mount in one location – on the 45mm f2 Rokkor the best orientation is with the aperture ring set around the f5.6 mark.
This is the tough bit, especially for a beginner. You need to get the ball bearing trapped into position. Apply the aperture ring at a slight angle to the body to trap the ball bearing and then push the rest of the aperture ring down and into place. You may need a small amount of pressure to do this but go careful. The aperture ring is plastic and can break if you apply too much force.
Once in place test the aperture ring by rotating it to make sure it is clicking nicely in place.
Use a bucket or large Tupperware box to do this part in to minimise the risk of losing the tiny bearing.
Give the rear element a clean. Normally I use just breath and a lint free cloth but if the lens is particularly hazed from oil I use a dilute Isoprop solution applied with a lint free cloth and then breath and the lint free cloth.
Replace the rear optical unit and its surround taking care to make sure the cut out in the surround is aligned with the aperture lever.
Take care as you work that the aperture ring stays in place. If it comes off you risk losing the small bearing.
Replace the rear optical unit screws.
Replace the lens mount making sure that the cut out in the lens mount aperture lever ‘captures’ the aperture lever on the diaphragm assembly.
Set the aperture ring to f16 and rotate the lens mount until the diaphragm closes down and the the screw holes align with the threads on the lens body.
Replace the lens mount screws and check diaphragm is operating normally across the range of the aperture ring. At f2 the aperture blades should just clear the edge of the diaphragm. Check aperture blades are moving move with each click stop on the aperture ring.
Once happy put the rear lens cap on and turn the lens over. It’s time to assemble the front elements of the lens.
Replace the front optical unit after suitable cleaning. I use a mild Isoprop solution and then breath with a microfibre cloth and a final blow out with a rocket blower.
Replace the three screws that retain the front optical unit.
Normally I use a collimator to set the lens at infinity but as these are hard to come by the alternate method is to mount the lens on a known good camera. Use the silver ring showing on the lens to focus.
Focus on a distant object. I use some radio towers which are around 8 miles away. If all is well the lens should come to focus easily.
Once the lens is focused at infinity check that the aperture is working correctly both for automatic stop down with the camera and by manually turning the aperture ring. The 45mm F2 is unforgiving and if the focus is set too far back it will jam the aperture. It has a very narrow range over which it will come to infinity focus without causing aperture jams which is why its critical to get the distances on the helicoils as close as possible. DO NOT MESS ABOUT BY WINDING THE FOCUS OUT! You can cause the inner helicoil to disengage from its lock tab.
With the lens at infinity replace the focus barrel so that the infinity mark is aligned with the lens index mark.
Replace the focus barrel retaining ring. Make sure it lines up with the threaded holes beneath.
Refit the screws but do not over-tighten. They will shear quite easily. Tighten no more than the pressure you can apply but having the screw driver handle between thumb and forefinger.
Check lens is fully working. Check that focus throw runs smoothly from infinity to minimum distance and that the lens is focused at infinity. Check the aperture is working correctly.
Replace the filter ring and secure with its retaining screws.
Minolta used differing filter rings – some have cuts out that go over the front optical unit retaining screws. Some have holes and some have tabs that stick out with holes in them.
Replace the beauty ring.
If all has gone well then give yourself a well deserved cup of tea some hearty self congratulation and enjoy the lens.
The lens used in this guide will be sold in our online store in due course.
This Nikon 50mm Repair Guide article can always be improved. If you have any questions and or comments we would love to hear them below. Mel.
Mel is one of the driving forces behind High 5 Cameras and writes all our articles.
Starting serious photography back in 1972. Over the years she got to shoot film with most of the major brands in 35mm and large format as both a studio photographer and content provider for websites in the early life of the web. These days she is rediscovering photography and has become the GOTO person for knowledge on camera repair advice.
Pentax Film Camera Project :- Over the past 12 months there has been a flurry of speculation that Pentax would soon bring to market a new 35mm film camera.
Much of this has been provoked by some interviews with people at Pentax who are working on their film project. There are tons of speculative reports on this and doubtless with 5 minutes of searching online you will find the same interviews being rehashed in various forms.
Here’s our take on what we can expect coming soon, what we can expect coming later and why of all the manufacturers currently around Pentax would choose to launch film – it does make a kind of sense after all.
Before we get stuck into speculation lets take a quick look at the Pentax history.
In 1957 Pentax pretty much created the 35mm film camera that we all came to know and love. Their basic design stood the test for nearly 40 years and the same basic layout was used, with a few notable exceptions, by every major 35mm SLR film camera manufacturer.
In 1964 the Pentax Spotmatic launched, which built on the basic layout of the original Pentax camera and lasted until 1975 when Pentax launched the ‘K’ series. The flagship KX has been all but forgotten among modern film users but it was pioneering stuff in its day. Silicon photo diodes for it light meter and the then radical departure (for Pentax) from the classic M42 screw mount to the new ‘K’ mount from which the series derived its name. The budget camera from the series was of course the K1000 – built to a lower specification than the KX for students and the financially constrained.
From the original Pentax to the K series the cameras were built like a tank, solid, heavy and reliable but after the arrival of the Olympus OM-1 all manufacturers looked to shrink down their offerings to dinky sizes. The Pentax solution was the MX. One of the very last all mechanical, manual focus SLRs.
The budget K1000 trudged on until 1997 making it a contender for the last manual focus 35 SLR though the Minolta X-300 can also lay claim to that title and probably does pip the K1000.
So you can see Pentax were there at the start and there right at the end of the all mechanical 35mm film cameras. It’s written into their DNA.
So why start making film again? Of the big 5 manufacturers in the heyday of Japanese cameras Pentax have been the only player to not be terribly successful in the world of digital cameras. Their digital offering, while amazingly sophisticated has just lacked the heavyweight punch of Canon and Nikon. Minolta of course ceased making cameras altogether in 2006.
With a rise of interest in film and weakening sales in their digital line it makes sense for Pentax to be the first mover in getting back to film to try and capture a potential emerging market. There are rumours that Nikon are also looking to get a film camera back into production. There’s also some sense here, as Nikon are probably still smarting from losing out to Canon way back. Nikon did indeed make a limited edition redux of one of their early rangefinders. Prices were astronomical and production was severely limited to the availability of parts they had left over in inventory. We don’t doubt Nikon are also eyeing the film market.
So why is it taking so long? Well, putting even a simple compact point and shoot together needs a fair amount of work. Lenses have to be designed and here’s the biggest problem. No one has had to design a film transport mechanism for 30+ years. Older designers and experts have retired and the word from Pentax is that they had a lot of problems. Modern designers had not realised just how complicated it is. The Pentax Film Camera Project team admitted they had to get people out of retirement to get the mechanisms debugged and working. Anyone who has had the guts of a camera to pieces will appreciate theres a fair amount of springs and gears needed to make it all work. Unlike the golden age when there was a base of existing products to build on and designers and engineers were still around this time it’s all having to be done from scratch.
Pentax Film Camera Project: It ain’t as easy as you may think. This the base of an SLR but a compact needs similar gearing.
To the simple, all things are simple. After all it’s only winding film from one end of the camera to the other isn’t it? Well the short answer is no. As the take up spool in the camera increases in size as more film gets wound on the camera has to have gears that allow for that so the frame sizes stay the same. The sprocket winding the film through the mechanism has to stay in synch with the take up spool which is getting bigger with each picture you take. In addition the gears have to wind on the frame counter and arm the shutter. It all makes for a big challenge in mechanical engineering.
Whats the plan? From all the hype it would seem that Pentax are most likely to develop a simple compact in the first go. From reading all the announcements and pronouncements we are thinking something very basic. Probably manual winding, fixed focus and probably not too far from the current Kodak offering though perhaps with better optics. Pentax have since suggested there will be four cameras in the initial line up so we think that will come out to be probably a very base level point and shoot either fixed focus or basic auto focus and built in flash. Probably a more de-luxe version with autowinding and here’s the real gem – Pentax announced recently that one of the four will be a basic camera with a replaceable lens. So we could be looking at something akin to a K1000.
From the point and shoot side of things we’d imagine Pentax will aim low on spec but high on quality. It’s typical for the far east to start with something simple that they know they can get right and reliable. The Japanese makers are never shy of running a ‘back margin’ – eg selling below cost to kickstart the market and then release version 2 with more features at a higher price to get any losses back. It’s the way the far east operates. Get the reliability and price right and then find out how to make money from it later.
Kodak F9 – possibly where Pentax will go on launch.
The dream camera for many would be something akin to the Olympus mju:1 / Stylus
We expect something akin to the current Kodak line up at the start and probably something more akin to the vaunted Olympus mju:1 (also known as the Stylus) later on. The Olmpus mju:1 has a huge following and even clapped out examples will fetch £90 and up so its potential fertile ground to kickstart a new market.
While rebuilding a K1000 in its original form might be hard work it does kind of make sense. The late Chinese copies of the K1000 were primarily plastic. We could imagine it having a K mount lens fitting – it would make sense as there is still so many K mount lenses out there and frankly it would be hard to imagine Pentax would do it different – the K mount, like film, is in the Pentax DNA. They own the design and it would cut down the time needed to develop any lenses as they could simply repackage known designs. The design could be simplified and reduced rather like the Minolta X-300. It wouldn’t be hard to build program mode into it. When program mode first became available in the 1980s it was a tough one to do thanks to the electronics but today with custom chips you could build a manual focus camera with full program mode quite cheaply if the will were there to do it.
An early Pentax K1000 and a late model Minolta X-300. The Minolta is probably the last manual focus 35mm SLR in production – the Chinese versions only ceased production in 2012!
The Chinese were making clones of the Minolta X-300 right up to 2012 (probably pipping the K1000 as the last manual focus film SLR in production) and managed to strip the design down to just its basic essence and get the price low. The X-300 was a stripped down version of Minoltas premium X-700. Minolta cut down costs by using plastic, replacing complex and expensive mechanics with electronics and simplifying the top deck to speed construction and chip the price down. Theres no reason Pentax couldn’t do the same today. What will the new Pentax camera cost? Currently anyones guess. Our bet would be the compact would run around £100 to £200 and the SLR if it were to mature to a live product will probably run around £1,500 – maybe as high as £3,000. Much depends on what the Pentax game plan is and they haven’t’ really said much. If their game is make some cash then they will aim at premium but they will have problems there because who is going to spend £1,500+ on a new film camera when they could buy a rock solid classic like an original K1000 for around £200 or less. So a lot will depend on the feature set that Pentax have in mind and what their marketing plan is for these cameras.
As a guide to pricing in 1985 a Minolta X-300 cost around £125 – allowing for inflation that would mean it would cost around £400 today. BUT…. the premium cameras back then were closer to £400 which, allowing for inflation would mean a price of around £1,200 today. I’d very much suspect that the Pentax 35mm film SLR, assuming it comes to market will carry a premium tag price of at least a 40% uplift so that would equate to a tag price of around £1,700. For Americans reading this just change the £ sign to $. It will be the same because Pentax will pitch to the $ price and when that stuff comes across the pond this kind of product will just do a 1:1 exchange.
When will we see the Pentax Film Camera Project deliver? The Pentax Film Camera Project suggest 2024 will see the launch of the first four cameras so the next 12 months will be interesting for all of us film fans and users.
Dont be surprised if Pentax stay close mouthed or even misdirect and spoof. They will be as aware as anyone that the other manufacturers are watching closely.
One of the best kept secrets of the golden age of Japanese cameras was Minolta never telling anyone they had cracked auto-focus, in fact they never even said they were even looking at it. They let Pentax and Nikon bumble about showing prototypes that never really worked at trade fairs and then wallop! Delivered a killer punch to the market. It didn’t play out in the long run for Minolta. For us lovers of film lets hope Pentax have better luck.
Update 13th Jan 2024
A recent briefing by Pentax regarding future developments did not yield much information. Pentax are staying very close mouthed about the film project. As we said in the original article they are unlikely to show any cards just yet. The industry as a whole is sceptical about this but with Pentax clearly struggling to stay relevant in digital it would make more sense than ever to get back to film.
A recent video the Pentax Film project released extolling the virtues of film showed, in a short clip, what could be something like a 35mm SLR in development.
The dream of many – a redux of the classic K1000
Responses from various film forums also show a large amount of scepticism but the common themes are very similar. Here’s our response to the most frequent sceptical comments.
1 Film is a Shrinking Market
Is it? This is heard from many forums these days but we would question that. Kodak most recently sold off a lot of its subsidiary and secondary businesses to invest in film production. Over 350 new staff have been taken on to support film production and Kodak are finding they simply can’t keep pace with demand. That doesn’t sound much like a shrinking market to us. Smaller than in its heyday? Of course it smaller than the glory days of the 1970’s and 1980’s but analyst expectation is for a steady growth in film. You can quibble the numbers but the fact is film is growing. Harman, the owners of Ilford, have just invested in Phoenix – a brand new color film with a new emulsion. Numerous Chinese manufacturers are also ramping up. These are hard headed business decisions being taken. Yes they are undoubtedly a risk but our experience is that businesses seldom take big risks so they are in fact betting on a near certainty or at the very least a high probability of making money
2 Surely film uptake is just a blip
Again the question would be is it? People said the same about LP sales 20 years ago (what younger folk call vinyl) yet vinyl sales have increased steadily for the last 16 YEARS! Most modern artists release on to vinyl these days. 16 years worth of year on year record numbers can’t be considered a blip! With substantial increasing sales new manufacturers have come into the market to produce the hardware like record decks too. People find the sound is nicer, its more immersive and therefore more enjoyable to listen to. That kind of sounds like the same reasons people move into film cameras and away from digital.
3 There’s so many old cameras out there who will buy a new one?
The same people who currently buy record desks for vinyl – there are hundreds, probably millions of old record decks out there but after 40 years in an attic stuff breaks down. Just like old cameras.
Classic cameras from the 1970s were designed with servicing in mind. Few of them will ever have had it. Shutter speeds will be off by a mile on most of them plus internal seals will have failed in many cases. Some of this stuff is doable by the average person like the light seals but a Minolta SRT for example has 22 foam and rubber seals inside, these will have perished. Even the mighty Nikon F will start to lose accuracy, suffer prism rot and dried out lubrication. Who’s going to repair them for you? Most techs are now ageing and close to retirement. Last year alone saw three of the UKs few remaining techs pack it in for good. Even if you can find a tech spares are hard to come by and in some cases impossible. Whole model ranges and marques are now impossible to repair and that will only get worse as time goes by.
So, there are plenty of cameras out there for now – but who will be around to fix them for you?
Lenses are another weak spot for film cameras. Many lenses from the 1970s suffer dried out lubrication, as the lubrication vaporises it deposits oil vapour onto the glass surfaces causing haze. Many lenses from the 1980s used encapsulated elements making repair or cleaning impossible. Earlier lenses survive better but even they can fall foul of terminal conditions like coating failure caused by fungus.
Just like vinyl – if film is to stay here people need to be making new stuff that’s reliable – the camera industry in its hey day turned out a few million cameras but it’s not infinite and as time goes by some of these, maybe most, will start to fail. Certainly if film is to have a future there will need to be new products – Kodak and Harman aren’t going to stay making film if its just a few old farts shooting their classic Exacta or 1964 Spotmatic.
4. Surely the price of film makes it impossible to imagine it gaining ground again?
People keep raising the price of film as an argument. If you do an inflation calculation you will find the cost of most films is now not so different than it was in the 1970s.
An old magazine advertisment I found gives a price for a 36 exposure roll of HP5 at £1.80 in 1984. Using the Bank of Englands inflation calculator gives a price today of £5.71. Shopping around you can find Ilford HP5 at around £6 so yes its gone up slightly but it’s hardly that much more expensive and you can always opt for plenty of budget films out there for a lot less. Check out Mike Eckmans page here
Even allowing for the cost of some of the more exotic films they are still less than a cup of hot brown water and a mass produced muffin in one of the trendy (and pretty ghastly) coffee franchises.
I always find it odd that people will whine about the cost of film but are seemingly happy to part with a more substantial sums from some hot brown water or some nasty chemically produced beer which currently sells at £5.90 a pint in the UK. In part the price is undoubtedly down to shortage of supply but it would be fair to say the cost of raw materials has increased over that time.
The rising cost of film is in fact all the more reason why we all need a modern camera, or at least get old ones serviced while you still can. If the costs of taking a picture on film is in fact rising you really don’t want shots wasted thanks to an unreliable camera that suddenly exhibits shutter capping or a lens which is hazing badly.
5 It will be hugely expensive to design a new film camera
Well it would be expensive but not unreasonably so. Modern manufacturing techniques and CAD/CAM will cut the cost. Back in the 1960s many of these camera designs had to be done by hand, people actually drawing the parts up using a pen and paper. Skilled staff were needed to make the parts and more skilled staff were needed to assemble the parts into the camera. Development of a new model could take two years (the Minolta XE was almost 10 years in development!) because prototypes had to be made as one-off models. Today a lot of the work can be done on a computer, prototypes can be 3D printed or CNC machined very rapidly. Pentax have by their own admission struggled because some of the know how has been lost but once they are over the hump they will speed up exponentially. Lens design like the mechanics can be done very quickly these days with CAD systems. Compared to the cost of silicon chip design and manufacture a mechanical camera and lenses wont be THAT expensive to design and of course should Pentax go the K mount route that will cut lens design time down considerably.
A good comparison here is telescope manufacture. Back in the 1960s companies like Unitron (then in their heyday) charged a huge amount for their wares. Manufacturing telescope lenses and tubes created virtually a hand made product. Today companies like Synta in China can turn out a vastly better spec telescope in lens sizes that amateurs back in the 1960s could only dream about for not much cash. Parabolic mirrors which back in the 1960s were the preserve of serious observatories and NASA are now readily available at specifications that would be have been beyond scientific grade back then. And remember the amateur astronomy market is quite tiny. We’d find it hard to believe there is a sufficient market size that allows modern lens companies like Synta and Televue to produce an ever more amazing array of gear for a tiny number of people who do serious amateur astronomy and yet a similar sized market of film enthusiasts wont find a company willing to do likewise. Synta and Televue are having to push the very boundaries of whats possible with optics – a redux of a film camera from the golden age requires a lot less investment than developing a whole new generation of gear that pushes the limits of optical design every 12 months or so.
6 Is any of this real?
Well you better believe it. Industry reports are very divided but the overall outlook is film is growing at around 2.8% (it may be as high as 8% depending one which report you read and how you interpret the data) and the smart phone market is in decline as the market is now at saturation point. Many people are turning to something a bit more thoughtful than a phone to store their memories.
One of the headaches for analysts is that unlike days of yore when there were a few big players to keep an eye on and you could easily analyse their earnings reports these days there is a very fractured market space with a very high degree of segmentation. Yes you can easily find out what Harman or Kodak are up to from their sales numbers but you are blind to what’s happening at Orwo or Kosmo films or the two dozen other specialists producers of film products and of course no industry analysts are going to be looking at the sales volumes of second hand cameras from J.Bloggs Photo Mart so a lot of the analyst reports are guesswork. Our bet is the potential market is very much underestimated – lets hope so for a new film camera from Pentax.
Update 18th March 2024
Pentax announced on the 1st March that the new film camera will be a vertical format, half frame camera with zone focusing so we’d expect it to look more Konica Pop than anything. Pentax now predict Summer 2024 for release. The usual notices from Pentax about how terribly tough its been to get the technology back from the dustbin it was all consigned to years ago but some things have become more clear in their announcement if you read between the lines.
First off is the rationale for the film camera appears to be retro style for a younger audience so expect a low quality offering for retro style photos. The vertical format and half frame may play well though. The vertical format will make it seem more like a smart phone which may help make it look familiar and therefore more be appealing to younger buyers (If you have never seen a vertical format half frame so a web search for the Taron Chic). The half-frame format also saves on film costs as you’ll get 72 shots from a roll instead of 36 albeit at the expense of quality but the lower price will save on film costs so it makes sense for a younger market.
What was most interesting about the update from Pentax was their statement that they wanted some assurance that film would be available and they are now comfortable that film will be around so are now green-lighting this for production. Us film fans should take a measure of comfort from that because you can bet your prize camera that Pentax wouldn’t do a thing unless they had some solid assurance from the likes Kodak and Fuji that they weren’t planning on getting out of film anytime soon.
On forums it’s overall been a big thumbs down as people keep wittering on about who will buy a film camera given the fact that most people smart phones but here’s a thought for you. Back in the hey-day of film most people NEVER owned any sort of camera or at most a snap-o-matic point and shoot like a Kodak Instamatic. Classic shooters today largely seem to forget that the prosumer and professional SLRs of yesteryear were always a very tiny market. You may think of classic cameras as being made in the millions but few ever were – many classic cameras were made in quite small numbers. There were a few exceptions but these were almost always cameras aimed at the low end of the market proving the point. Almost all camera production was geared to point and shoots. The point being that the people today blatting pics onto their smartphones were the people who back in the 1970s were never going to own any camera at all! The fact that most people didn’t own a camera or have any interest in owning one did not change the dynamics of the market back then and the idea that people who own a smartphone wont buy a camera wont change the market dynamics for a modern film camera today either – those are the people who simply were never going to buy a camera anyway either then or now.
As we have said before the best chances of keeping film alive are new products coming to market so we are wishing Pentax every success in this one. Anything which gets people interested in film has to ba a good thing.
Mel is one of the driving forces behind High 5 Cameras and writes all our articles.
Starting serious photography back in 1972. Over the years she got to shoot film with most of the major brands in 35mm and large format as both a studio photographer and content provider for websites in the early life of the web. These days she is rediscovering photography and has become the GOTO person for knowledge on camera repair advice.
One of the things that drives me mad with many photographers online, and in the flesh very often, is their push for ever more expensive gear but a complete lack of actually GOING somewhere or DOING something with it.
Now I can’t say I am completely devoid of ‘gearhead’ syndrome (also known as Collectivitis and Gear Acquisition Syndrome or GAS) but my own desire is kept in check by always asking the question of myself, ‘Do I need it?’ and critically ‘what could I achieve with this that I can’t achieve with what I have?’
I have observed, and this is especially true of gearheads riding the retro film Zeitgeist, that their ability to get any good results is often inversely proportional to the quantity of gear they own.
Some of the villains of this piece include the modern day ‘collectors’. They sit on the internet proudly showing their early 1968 Nikon or classic Rollei and declaiming about the wonders of the German or Japanese camera makers, but never get out there and shoot the bloody things! To me there is nothing sadder than a gearhead with a glass cabinet of wonders that is never shot. I wonder if they ever know (or care) that even in ideal storage conditions, vintage cameras naturally decay. Without regular use the lubricants harden and even with regular use seals decay inside. Being sat inside a glass case is hardly what the cameras makers and builders toiled for. That their amazing design and workmanship should sit in a glass display, like stuffed pheasants. This to me is very sad and reminds me of stuffed animals – glorious in the flesh but utterly diminished by being stuffed and put behind glass.
One of my own small collection. A near mint early Nikon F with early non-AI lenses – it’s regularly in use by me and absolutely not a shelf queen.
The key to actually getting pictures, and this was drummed into me years ago by a hoary old press photographer, is actually being somewhere where something is happening or the view is spectacular on in some other way of interest. His wise counsel, which I have always tried to follow (albeit with some occasional attacks of collectivitis), was always to spend your money going somewhere where you can get some interesting shots – NOT buying some new wonder kit which enables to you get even better pictures of your cat or your backyard.
Typical of this behaviour is seeing someone on a film group ages ago where a poster did exactly the opposite of my old press packers advice. The miscreant had a wonderful, array of Hasselblad, Bronicas and Rollies that were used to produce an almost inexhaustible supply of pictures of his cat, his granny, his back garden etc. Sadly some of these were excellently shot but unbelievably dull to look at. I am not a snob about this. If shooting pictures of your cat is what you want to do then you have my complete permission to carry on, however I am talking about creating meaningful photography not filling a snap shot album for my cat who would struggle to appreciate it not having opposable thumbs.
Now, none of this means you can’t get good stuff locally. I am currently working on a couple of projects where I am looking at the plight of the homeless in my local area and I’m always on the lookout for the interesting, the bizarre or the occasional candid. One of my other projects is covering peoples interactions with their phones. So if you’re on a budget then you can always find a project to work on thats local. No one is suggesting you should sell your kids into slavery to fund a trip to the Bahamas with a Super Model!
Through the eyes of a child… Homelessness in the one of the richest countries in the world.
Praying for a signal? Tourist in Gothic Cathedral struggles to get a picture or signal or both.
Having a project in mind helps to steer you towards photo opportunities. Wandering around aimlessly will usually just provoke you into using up film taking more bland pictures. Now a tip here is you won’t find 36 interesting pictures on a single roll. I doubt I have taken 36 killer pictures in my entire life! So you need multiple projects so you can bag what happens as and when. For instance the homeless man was on the same roll as a few other candid pics of other things.
It may be macro is your thing – I was hiking a couple of years ago and ran into a photographer doing macro photography in the middle of nowhere. As he sat there patiently waiting for THE shot he told me the damsel flies were better there than anywhere else. I could only demur at his know how and wished him well. It’s not my thing for sure but the point is he wasn’t trying out his new wonder lens in his backyard he was out there trying for the perfect shot. He had done his research, knew where to go, what time of day and was clearly expert at his work and critically he was THERE.
The curse of gear-itis is it usually acts as a block to creativity.
Melanie
A lesson well learned, although occasionally forgotten by me, is this. Many years ago when I was suffering super acute Gear Acquisition Syndrome (GAS) I found my pictures were getting worse. The usual antidote to this was to buy more gear and I am sure readers will be familiar with this. It goes something like ‘if I could just have a billionth of second shutter speed I could get more interesting pictures’ or ‘if I could have an f.95 lens I’d be able to get better shots’ but the truth is, if you stopped buying gear you’d do better. A long time ago I was young, a bit later on I was a bit less young but had money in my pocket. With cash and a penchant for more gear I slowly started filling a camera bag with filters. Filters would make me creative. Filters would make you look like a pro. Filters would turn the bland into – well the bland actually. The temptation was always to think that a filter would of itself create a good picture. In truth the filters could turn a good picture into a great one but would more often turn a bland picture into an even blander one but this time with some special effects thrown in.
Rock bottom – this is probably the epitome of what happens with too much gear. Multiple filters but absolutely bland photography. Yes I’ll admit to it. 28mm lens with 5 filters in play!
Back then, with a bag full of filters and just about every focal length lens that was possible to own I was despairing of getting good shots and seriously wondering what had gone wrong with my photography. Crushed by the the lack of good shots despite the every increasing size of the camera bag I decided to eat some humble pie and seek lessons. My hoary old ex-press photographer teacher looked over my bulging camera bag with a weary eye and a poorly disguised look of contempt and then handed me a Box Brownie and told me it had a 12 shot black and white roll loaded and not to come back until I had composed 12 good pictures.
Now a box brownie poses some serious challenges. Fixed lens, fixed focus, fixed f stop and the less than scorching 1/60th second shutter speed. Cleary speeding cars and long lensing was out. You simply HAD to look for shots and work hard for them.
The lesson it taught me was of course getting a good shot is down to you NOT the camera. I didn’t succeed in getting 12 cracking shots but it did force me to focus on what’s important and what’s important isn’t actually the gear. Yes a faster shutter speed will help you if you’re a sports photographer, a 1000mm super fast lens will help a nature photographer but experts in those fields will get a good picture with almost anything.
Now if your reading this and thinking ‘well of course I know that’ then ask yourself the question ‘why aren’t you doing it’ because most of us blather on about photography being an art form, it being in the eye of the photographer blah blah blah but most of us (and I include me in that) are very often swayed by the idea that some new camera, new type of film, new lens will resolve our issues and make us better. Of course if you are taking killer pics every week then you should move on because these articles are clearly not meant for you.
Travel broadens the mind and it’s usually cheaper than buying new gear too! Me on Koya Mountain, Japan with a trusty Konica S2. It may look warm but it was extremely cold – later on we nearly died on a mountain in a blizzard – the Konica was never the same again.
So, if you’re thinking your photography is at a dead end then get yourself a project or better yet spend some money on going places rather than keep spending on gear which will only ever have a very nominal input to the quality of your photography.
I will be doing a series of articles on the theme of ‘being there’ across 2024 – this is just the first clip round the ear to maybe get you thinking about what you can be doing better. I’ll be looking at getting projects going and finishing up with people at the very sharp end of things.
Go away now and get some decent pictures because I swear if I see one more picture of ‘Tibbles’ the cat shot on some super rare classic I may just be forced to find out where you live and hand you an ‘observers book of the countryside’ and drag you kicking and screaming into it to do something creative. However if you’re sitting there getting angry and thinking ‘I can do better’ then good – go and do it and then this article will have achieved its purpose in getting your arse in gear.
Mel is one of the driving forces behind High 5 Cameras and writes all our articles.
Starting serious photography back in 1972. Over the years she got to shoot film with most of the major brands in 35mm and large format as both a studio photographer and content provider for websites in the early life of the web. These days she is rediscovering photography and has become the GOTO person for knowledge on camera repair advice.
Nikon F-301 Review:- One of the most underrated 35mm film SLRs in todays world has to be the Nikon F-301. I suppose that is to be expected considering it had a very short production life and was generally hated in its day by the Nikonista fraternity.
Launched in 1985 and withdrawn around 1987 the Nikon F-301 was almost the last manual focus camera from Nikon for the consumer end of the market (the FM 10 was made by Cosina) and followed on from the rather nasty EM and FG models but my-oh-my – third time was a charm. The Nikon F-301 despite its Nikonista detractors is a marvellous camera to shoot with.
Let’s take a look at how it arrived, why it was dead before its time and just how good it really is.
When is a Nikon F not a Nikon F? – When its a Nikon F-301 of course! – Hated by Nikon fans but every bit as good as anything Nikon ever made.
Nikon F-301 Review : Third Times a Charm…
After the major success Canon had with the AE-1 launched in 1976 all of the manufacturers wanted a taste of that large market that Canon had successfully opened up and every major manufacturer got to work to scoop up some of those consumers with spare cash in their hands and a fancy to own a 35mm SLR. Minolta would be the only player to seriously eat into Canon’s dinner but it’s fair to say everybody wanted a slice of that pie including the mighty Nikon – home of the serious camera for professionals.
Nikon, not wanting to be left out of this new gold rush, got stuck in, rolled up their sleeves and launched the EM in 1979, an unashamed entry level camera, the EM supported only aperture priority auto. Nikon even made the camera tiny so it would better suit female sized hands (aww bless them). The EM was barely in production for three years before being withdrawn. Reliability was a big issue with the EM. Its electronics had a reputation for unreliability and doubtless Nikon feared for their brand image, and also probably got tired of whiney-ass consumers cluttering up the repairs department. On the plus side the low cost Series E glass designed for the EM really cut the mustard – being within an ace of the top end Nikkors.
The EM wasn’t a complete disaster – from the EM came the amazingly good E Series lenses.
Undeterred by a minor set back like an unreliable camera that no one wanted (not even the girly types it seemed) Nikon rolled up their shirtsleeves (again!) and got on with producing a replacement. This would be the Nikon FG released in 1982.
The FG would be the first Nikon ever with program mode and the first Nikon with TTL flash (though trailing behind Minolta who got there first as usual a year earlier with the X-700). The FG also supported full manual and aperture priority and with its vertical metal bladed shutter it should have been a winner but, sadly, those pesky electronics let it down again and like the EM, Nikon found themselves knee deep in repairs and dealing with even more legions of shouty customers on the phone.
Oh dear! The consumer end of the market was going to be a lot harder than I expect anyone at Nikon imagined.
Doubtless one of the problems Nikon faced was that before the EM they had never really dabbled in the bottom end of the market except for point and shoots. It’s all very well being ace at producing top end gear where money is no object either in production cost or the final ticket price but getting the right blend of features and reliability at the bottom end of the market actually takes some doing as a fair few manufacturers had said on their way to a bankruptcy hearing.
It’s easy to forget that back then while Nikon, Minolta, Canon et al were busy cramming silicon chips into tiny cameras the computer I am typing this on and the one you are doubtless reading it on was in its infancy. PCs back then were B-I-G, like the size of a suitcase big, expensive and almost no one owned one.
The bottom line here was getting chips into a camera to run off tiny voltages and be fast and reliable was not so easy as it would seem to younger folk today who take reliability for granted. Back then TVs, Stereos and the like failing was a fact of life.
Nikon, and you have to admire their persistence here, were unfazed. A lesser manufacturer may have given up (and indeed some did, and some went bankrupt too!), but the FG was duly retired in 1985/86 when they unveiled consumer camera number three.
I would like to believe they called it the F-301 because it was in fact the third time around to try and get it right. It would make a good story except they ruined it by calling it the N2000 for the US market!
So would the F-301 be a case of third times a charm? Read on…
Nikon F-301 Review : Shock and Awe
Its fair to say the Nikon-F301 made quite a splash when it arrived. Its styling was somewhat radical copying the overall look of the professional class F3 in its general appearance including the new Nikon brand styling red stripe.
The F-301 was the first Nikon to have a polycarbonate body and the first Nikon to delete the film advance lever in favour of a built in motor drive – you could hear the Nikonistas getting triggered by the noise that grinding teeth make when en-masse – almost as loud as the racket the F-301 makes when its motor drive kicks in. It was also the first Nikon to use DX coding.
Some considered it a new dawn for Nikon but traditional Nikon users hated it with the sort of passion normally seen in medieval religious warfare.
They hated the plastic, they hated the complete reliance on electronics (there’s no mechanical mode here sonny), they hated it because it wasn’t made out of armour plate and didn’t have lots of tiny gears whizzing around. They had only just accepted the professional grade F3 having an electronic shutter and now this…a completely plastic camera! First it was the threat of nuclear war, then the rise of international terrorism, we might all be murdered in our beds and now this – a Nikon made out of plastic! It was all too much! Surely the end of days was fast approaching!
That was the shock – what about the awe. Well the F-301 was the consumer camera to end them all, verging on prosumer territory and even in use by pros (more on that later).
By the time the F-301 arrived Canon had the AE-1P with program Mode and Shutter Priority (SP) and Minolta had the X-700 with Program Mode and Aperture Priority (AP). The F-301 would support Aperture Priority (AP) and TWO Program modes. One for normal use optimised for aperture and one for fast action optimised for shutter speed. On top of that Nikon would use a metal vertical bladed shutter to give the camera stunning accuracy and speeds up to 2000th where the Canon AE-1P and Minolta X-700 used cloth horizontal shutters which limited them to a maximum speed of 1000th.
Nikon really pulled all the stops out with the F-301 and gave it TTL flash like its predecessor the FG, a very fast internal autowinder/motor drive that can run faster than some dedicated motor drives and on top of that gave it one of the brightest and sharpest viewfinders of any SLR. Only Minoltas X-700 with its Acumatte screen can beat it and it would be a photo finish as to which is the brightest and best. The focus screen is by any reasonable definition superb and some go as far as to say maybe the best focus screen Nikon ever made.
To help the beginner Nikon gave the camera an automatic film loading function which made loading film as simple as most of the point and shoots, PLUS DX coding so the camera would set the film speed for you if you wished though you could set it manually and the camera would helpfully alert you if no DX coding was set. It also used AAA batteries which gave it a huge battery life even if you were using the motordrive. For an absolutely flat out superb prosumer camera Nikon cut the price and managed to get it into the consumers mitts around 10% cheaper than the front running rivals from Canon and Minolta.
Oh yeah – they also got it to be reliable. Third time really was a charm for Nikon.
Nikon F-301 Review: Film speed ring and exposure compensation, DX coding can be set and the camera will beep and flash the LED if the film doesn’t have a DX code.
Nikon F-301 Review: Very traditional controls but no film advance lever which made the Nikonistas gnash their teeth.
Nikon F-301 Review : Poor Boys F3
It has been said of the F-301 that it’s a poor boys F3 but that doesn’t really do the F-301 justice making it sound like a cheapo knock off. Inexpensive it may have been but it’s a fabulous shooter of a camera in its own right.
Its program mode is just about the best I have ever used and left to its own devices it can almost always get the shot even when lighting is tricky.
Nikon had produced the Series ‘E’ lenses for the ill fated EM series and most F-301s were sold with the Series ‘E’ lenses as a low cost alternative to the Nikkor lenses mostly associated with Nikon. These budget lenses now have a cult following and frankly they are within a hair as good as the Nikkors. I seriously doubt anyone would ever notice the difference . You can read about the Series E lenses in the preamble to the repair guide here.
I came to the F-301 via owning Nikon Fs as a Pro. For my holiday camera or just lightweight use I had traditionally used either a Pentax Spotmatic or an Olympus OM-1. The Nikon F is wonderful but its also heavy and bulky so for holiday use and day trips with the family I would take a lightweight swinger with me. In a moment of madness and uncharacteristic brand loyalty I bought an Olympus OM-4Ti from a shop while out and about as my new swinger and found I hated it.
I hated its overall poor performance, hated its fussy meter and mostly hated it because it ate batteries like Smints and spent more time at Olympus being repaired than it spent doing any actual shooting. I was at the end of my tether with the OM-4Ti after a years-worth of it always playing up and while in my favourite camera shop venting about it while chewing the edge of their countertop they helpfully offered a Nikon F-301 on approval. As a consummate Nikon F user I was somewhat surprised by the F-301, it looked so unlike any Nikon I had ever seen but I was hardly a brand loyalist (The OM-4Ti had cured fangirl-itis for good) so I thought ‘well why not?’ it could accept most of my Nikon lenses which was a bonus. A big plus for me at the time was I did a lot of travel to out of the way places – while you could always find someone who could sell you some AAAs finding someone who could sell you some weird mercury battery was always a challenge. I spent a whole day in Kefalonia in ’82 seeking SR44s to keep the OM4Ti running as it munched its way through the entire carton of spares!
Nikon F-301 Review: One of the biggest attractions for me was the camera using standard cells. No more hunting for weird batteries when out in the back of beyond.
I found in use the F-301 performed amazingly well. With its very fast built in motor drive it could rival almost any other motor drives for speed and get it all in a relatively compact package – smaller and lighter than almost any other SLR with a motor drive attached.
The only missing feature was a depth of field preview which most budget and consumer cameras leave off and which, back then doing press work, I never used anyway.
I loved its big bright focus screen, its near perfect program mode which could always pull a shot and its toughness. It may be made of plastic but it’s a tough camera.
I liked it so much I not only went back and paid for it but had another one as a back-up. Over time the F-301 started to be used more and more for professional work and there hangs a tale.
One of the F-301s was damaged badly on a freelance shoot and so I went back to get another and damn! It was no longer available.
I can’t state the veracity of this but the guys in my favourite store told me that Nikon had stopped making it because it was starting to eat sales of their top end gear. Press packers like me who always needed spares had usually of course bought a spare F3 body or an FM. Some of these had opted to start using F-301s as backups and why not! It was cheaper to risk an F-301 in a riot than an F3 after all. Now I can’t say whether that’s true or not but it has a ring of truth to it. I suspect the real reason though was the rise of Auto Focus cameras. After all the Nikon F-501 came out in 1986 and was basically an F-301 with Auto Focus. With Auto Focus taking over the the market F-301 was retired in 1987 – barely two years since it had launched.
I managed to find a spare from shelf stock elsewhere and continued using them and enjoying them until the millennium when I started cutting over to digital.
A word here on professionals using amateur gear. It’s always worth remembering that owning professional cameras doesn’t make anyone a pro. The feature sets may be richer but the real magic in photography is the eye of the photographer. Most of the 20th centuries most iconic photos were taken with cameras with a lot less sophistication than the Nikon F-301. Check out Steve McCurry’s Afghan Girl taken with a prosumer Nikon FM2.
Here’s some pics on a trip to Bruges – all but one were done with a Nikon F-301 and a 50mm f1.8 E Series lens on Program mode. As you can see the camera calls it pretty close to perfect.
Tricky lighting? The F-301 makes short work of that with its program mode. Perfect exposure every time. Bruges Christmas Market on Fuji 400.
Program mode with the F-301 is superb. Back alley in Bruges with Kosmo Films Agent Shadow 400 at ASA 800.
Program mode with the F-301 is superb. Nightscape in Bruges with Kosmo Films Agent Shadow 400 at ASA 800.
Very long exposure with a Tamron 24mm and Fuji 400. F-301 on Program mode for a long exposure.
Nikon F-301 Review : Loud and Proud
The F-301s worst aspect by far is the racket the motor drive makes. It’s ok when you’re covering a riot or being all elbows in a press pack but for a lot of subjects the clamour of the auto winder is a bit distracting. Ok you can imitate the start of ‘Girls on Film’ or even pretend you’re a super spy getting shots of a Bond villain but it can be quite off-putting for some stuff.
On the up side the camera uses 4x AAA batteries and these last longer than most people will be shooting film for. Typically they can last for a great many rolls of film – as many as 30 rolls before you need a battery change. If that’s not enough for you Nikon did a bigger battery base as an option which would take 4x AAs. Unfortunately those giant AAA and AA batteries mean the tripod mount can’t be in the centre of the camera and Nikon used a very offset tripod fitting. You could buy a special adaptor to add to the base of the camera but obviously its increased bulk and weight. It’s just as well the batteries last a long time because without them the camera is a brick – theres no manual backup at all.
The F-301s greatest virtue though was the amazingly good viewfinder and the amazing Program mode which can almost always pull off the shot even when the light is tricky. Program mode on the F-301 works best with AIS lenses. It will also run with AI lenses in Program mode which is unique to the F-301 and and the Nikon FA. Non-AI lenses are a complete no-no. Non-AI lenses lack the slot for the cameras aperture follower and will either jam the follower or worse break it.
Nikon F-301 Review: AI and AIS lenses only for the Nikon F-301. Non AI lenses can jam or break the relatively fragile aperture follower circled in the picture.
Nikon F-301 Review: Exposure lock and self timer – like everything else with the F-301 the self timer is electronic
The viewfinder contains LEDs along its right side which show the shutter speed you have selected and the shutter speed the camera suggests or, which it will shoot at, if in AP or Program mode. The LEDs will also warn if you have selected Program mode but have not turned the lens down to minimum aperture.
The focus screen has a split image focus finder plus a microprism collar and a circle which shows the meter weighting zone – like most Nikons the meter is 60/40 centre weighted and the circle shows the 60% zone. When paired up with its fast 2000th of a second shutter speed and traditional controls for full manual operation the camera is a wonderful blend of high tech mated to traditional controls. Electronic it may be but there’s not an LCD panel in sight which gives the camera very traditional feel even though the whole thing is being run by a microprocessor.
Nikon F-301 Review : Third Times a Charm (Part 2)
The biggest headache with buying a Nikon F-301 today is the fact that although back in 1987 they could be trusted, like many electronic cameras the F-301 can suffer terminal failures due to its ageing electronics. I had to buy three duds to get a good one and another three duds behind that to get a second one that was also good.
The biggest risk to them is the damn batteries – you see the batteries lasted so long that people put the camera away and forgot about the batteries. They had probably never changed batteries since buying the camera new. Of course large alkaline batteries have a nasty habit of leaking and filling the camera with toxic acid and fumes. The surest way to know the provenance of an F-301 is check the base which is also the battery cover – if it shows evidence of corrosion then reject it unless the seller has evidence showing the camera is a complete runner.
Nikon F-301 Review: The biggest hazard to the buyer – Broken F-301s – these have damaged shutters, broken aperture followers and blown electronics.
Nikon F-301 Review: The F-301 has no memo holder instead it uses a see through area – the seal here can be a problem and lazy users and techs often just cover this up. The seal is quite complex to cut.
Nikon really did get it right back in the day and assuming you can find a good one it should be reliable enough. One of its upsides is that it was consumer grade and many mums and dads will not have used the camera much when they bought it. Meaning any good ones will probably still shoot a fair few thousand frames before they ever need attention so long as grandad took the batteries out!
The shutter in the F-301 is VERY accurate – among the most accurate I have ever tested. Of the good ones I have acquired the shutter can usually hit almost the exact speed with very little variance on speed every time. Typically a cloth horizontal shutter will have a deviation of around 20% and will deviate somewhat from shot to shot. The vertical shutter in the F-301 is almost always exactly right and has amazing consistency.
The final consideration you should give to any Nikon though is the cost of lenses. Nikon lenses command a big price tag even for the budget ‘E’ series which have now reached the level of Nikkors for pricing on the second-hand market. So, if this article makes you want to own a Nikon F-301 then consider the lens costs before you jump in. Even third party lenses get pricier as soon as they have a Nikon mount.
Nikon F-301 Review : Forgotten by Most
If the F-301 had been in place a bit earlier I suspect it would have been a world beater but in business timing is everything. Some products arrive too early and scare the consumers away, some arrive too late and the market has moved and some appear just in time but face reliability or production issues. For the Nikon F-301 it was just the perfect product but two years too late. With the Auto-Focus revolution in full swing by the time it arrived its core market of prosumers was melting away.
The Nikon F-301 today has been generally forgotten. It was in production for such a short time and it commands little respect from Nikon fans who were and are more swayed by Nikon F2s, FMs and FEs which are more pro or prosumer cameras with a better pedigree and look more Nikon than the F-301 ever did.
The F-301 may have been a case of third times a charm from the perspective of Nikon getting it right at the budget end of the market but like almost every late model manual focus 35mm SLR the F-301 would be a casualty of the autofocus revolution.
Forgotten by most – not by me who still enjoys the F-301 mightily – you might too.
Mel is one of the driving forces behind High 5 Cameras and writes all our articles.
Starting serious photography back in 1972. Over the years she got to shoot film with most of the major brands in 35mm and large format as both a studio photographer and content provider for websites in the early life of the web. These days she is rediscovering photography and has become the GOTO person for knowledge on camera repair advice.
