Nikkormat praise thread

[madNbad]

Anyone else with an FS?

 

[Dali]

Nikkormat FTn... I bought one used and it lasted for several rolls before the shutter refused to cock. Trashed it and sold the Nikkor 1.4/50mm lens attached to it. Heavy, noisy, bulky, not THAT reliable, I never tried to buy another one. End of the story with Nikon.

 

[Dan Fromm]

Nikkormat FTn... I bought one used and it lasted for several rolls before the shutter refused to cock. Trashed it and sold the Nikkor 1.4/50mm lens attached to it. Heavy, noisy, bulky, not THAT reliable, I never tried to buy another one. End of the story with Nikon.

Bought new or used?

 

[PhotoJim]

Nikkormat FTn... I bought one used and it lasted for several rolls before the shutter refused to cock. Trashed it and sold the Nikkor 1.4/50mm lens attached to it. Heavy, noisy, bulky, not THAT reliable, I never tried to buy another one. End of the story with Nikon.

Akin to giving up on Toyota or Honda because you bought a '74 Civic or Corolla once that needed some work, really, isn't it?

I've owned three Nikkormats (one really briefly and I didn't shoot with it; bought it for the lenses). The first needed new seals and once I did that work, it was a champion - an FTn. The second was an FT3 and it worked perfectly when I got it and until I sold it. I still miss it.

The FT-series Nikkormats have one feature I really miss - an exposure meter readout on the top plate. You can set the exposure using the internal meter without having to put your eye to the finder.

 

[abruzzi]

Anyone else with an FS?

I have one. I use it, along with a Pentax SV, to practice metering by eye.

I use Nikons, Pentax's and Bronicas, partly because the aperture dials and focus all move in the right direction. My first camera was a black Nikkormat FTn, that I still have and still works perfectly. I have since bought a silver FTn in almost perfect condition, and two FT2s (one black and one silver), as well as the FS. I also have a few F2s, all with metering for pre-AI lenses. I prefer the F2 by a tiny bit, but at some level, the Nikkormat feels more natural.

 

[Kodachromeguy]

Nikkormat FTn... I bought one used and it lasted for several rolls before the shutter refused to cock. Trashed it and sold the Nikkor 1.4/50mm lens attached to it. Heavy, noisy, bulky, not THAT reliable, I never tried to buy another one. End of the story with Nikon.

You bought one Nikkormat, probably going on 45 or 50 years old, and now you conclude Nikon products are unreliable? Did you really think this one through when you wrote those sentences?

 

[Nitroplait]

You bought one Nikkormat, probably going on 45 or 50 years old, and now you conclude Nikon products are unreliable? Did you really think this one through when you wrote those sentences?

Yeah, that's the internet for you. Reviews and opinions are mostly based on one sample. At least the wording in this case makes the fallacy obvious.

 

[Dali]

Looks like I hit a nerve among the Nikon afficionados community... Give you comment as long as it is positive or shut up. You guys have a stange idea of reality and do not accept anything going against your doxa. Pathetic.

 

[Dan Fromm]

Looks like I hit a nerve among the Nikon afficionados community... Give you comment as long as it is positive or shut up. You guys have a stange idea of reality and do not accept anything going against your doxa. Pathetic.

Dali, you bought a used camera with an unknown history of abuse.

So you'll know, my old Nik'mat FTN's little flash sync terminals were slightly fragile. I once broke the X sync pin. Shame on me. I was then working in Philadelphia so took it to a camera shop in center city with a well-regarded shop. They returned it with the sync pins miswired. "X" was "M," "M" was "X." Guess how I learned this. I don't blame the problem on Nikon, I blame it on myself (heavy handed, didn't test that the repair was done properly) and on the incompetent shop.

 

[Willy T]

Looks like I hit a nerve among the Nikon afficionados community... Give you comment as long as it is positive or shut up. You guys have a stange idea of reality and do not accept anything going against your doxa. Pathetic.

Well, you know, the title is 'Nikkormat Praise Thread.'

Kind of a dead giveaway. Don't think any sort of gauntlet was being thrown down here.

Anyhow, others are correct: a camera of any marque, more so if older, may fail. Nikons are arguably among the most reliable, long term.

 

[George Mann]

Nikons are arguably among the most reliable, long term.

Nothing to argue about here. Good Nikon models are the most reliable.

 

[PhotoJim]

Looks like I hit a nerve among the Nikon afficionados community... Give you comment as long as it is positive or shut up. You guys have a stange idea of reality and do not accept anything going against your doxa. Pathetic.

No. You just need to take a course on statistics and understand the effects of sample size on conclusions.

There are plenty of camera brands I wouldn't be interested in buying, but I would never suggest a person stop buying the brand because a decades-old example turned out not to be a good one.

 

[BradS]

Decision based upon sample size = 1

says a lot.

 

[Dan Fromm]

Decision based upon sample size = 1

says a lot.

Depends on the decision and supporting data. I've bought one GM car, will never buy another. I spent a lot of time working on it, saw many stupid choices of materials that GM didn't address (replacements identical in every respect to the original bits and as quick to fail) and stupider cost-cutting design decisions. No need to try more GM cars for confirmation (or not).

 

[PhotoJim]

Depends on the decision and supporting data. I've bought one GM car, will never buy another. I spent a lot of time working on it, saw many stupid choices of materials that GM didn't address (replacements identical in every respect to the original bits and as quick to fail) and stupider cost-cutting design decisions. No need to try more GM cars for confirmation (or not).

Fair enough. But no one who's given a Nikkormat a fair shake would ever accuse Nikon of cutting corners in making one.

 

[BradS]

Depends on the decision and supporting data. I've bought one GM car, will never buy another. I spent a lot of time working on it, saw many stupid choices of materials that GM didn't address (replacements identical in every respect to the original bits and as quick to fail) and stupider cost-cutting design decisions. No need to try more GM cars for confirmation (or not).

whatever.

Not sure what you’re trying to prove here but...you’ve once again supplied evidence that fails to contradict my hypothesis about your nature.

So yeah, whatever.

 

[Dan Fromm]

Brad, everyone knows that with n=1 the variance of an estimate of the mean is infinite. But there are special cases and some of us are Bayesians. In my car example, I knew a priori that sample to sample variation in cost cutting design decisions is nil. In this case n=1 is large enough to make the pass/fail decision. Stupid is chosen once and for all, not randomly.

I used to have problems with clients who'd taken Applied Statistics I and thought they knew everything. I'll never forget the one who said "With all that data you should be able to reach a conclusion." The data in question was garbage, largely irrelevant and drawn from a number of very different populations. Client wanted me to make a model that could be used to predict behavior other populations, all unlike the ones we had. I wasn't as rich or as secure as W. E. Deming but I politely refused to do the work.

 

[BradS]

Dan,
I'll start by asking for a bit leeway - I may not get all of the technical jargon quite right. I took that introductory statistics class a long time ago - before Kodak discontinued Panatomic-X.

You present us with a very interesting red herring with so many potentially interesting avenues for digression...

but allow me first to re-state my understanding of the two cases....

Case #1
"Nikkormat FTn...I bought one used and it lasted for several rolls before the shutter refused to cock. Trashed it and sold the Nikkor 1.4/50mm lens attached to it. Heavy, noisy, bulky, not THAT reliable, I never tried to buy another one. End of the story with Nikon."
my understanding:

• sample size one,
• unknown age and prior usage history (could be fifty years old and found under three inches of pond scum and goose shit at the bottom of the water hazard on the 17th hole at Pebble Beach for all we know)
• very limited observation (both time and usage)
• assumed underlying population: All Nikon SLR ever made ?
  
• Conclusion: "Nikons are not very reliable"

Case #2

• Sample size one
• unknown age and prior usage history
• extended observation time with considerable further in depth, expert(?) data points (longitudinal study?)
  
• implicit underlying population: not clear but at minimum, it appears to be all GM vehicles produced in and after the model year of the individual in your study. Is that correct?
  
• Conclusion: again, not clear to me but appears to be similar in scope and effect to that in case #1 ?

I cheerfully concede that taking a Bayesian approach (and assuming a uniform prior) to the analysis an in depth longitudinal study of a single individual...ah...how to say it?...produces more useful information than a simple experiment on one individual...wait....hold on a sec...one of the neighbor's f*ing feral cats just wandered into my living room....[noises and the voice of a retired engineer who thinks he knows every damned thing yelling, “get outta here you stupid cat!” can be heard coming from the living room, a cat screams, silence, footsteps approach]..... ok, I'm back.

Where was I?

Oh, yeah...despite the glaring dissimilarity between the two cases, both fail (both arrive at fallacious conclusions) for the same reason.
for each case: What population is contemplated? What implicit assumption is made about the variance of the population?
I posit that even under the most generous interpretation, nobody would think it reasonable to conclude that the variance of the underlying population, in either case, is in any way 'small' (and I think at least one of you may be, without realizing it, contemplating a fairly large and very diverse population with vanishingly small variance).

and just for the sake of clarity, just to save you any potential embarrassment now and at anytime in the future, I am biologically male (they tell me I was born that way but I really don’t remember), I identify as male, I present as male, my pronouns are the conventional pronouns associated with this state of being 'male'.

 

[Dan Fromm]

Brad, with respect to pronouns, I use "it" to avoid upsetting modern folks who are offended by he or she and because I think using they as singular is barbaric. I didn't mean to say anything about your sex or gender or whatever.

As I said, I'm sometimes a little Bayesian. I know a little, therefore don't always have diffuse priors. A Bayesian with a diffuse prior can't be told from a relative frequentist.

In the case of Dali and the dud used Nikkormat, well, Dali behaved like a bad relative frequentist, reasoned incorrectly from one problem example to all Nikkormats. I don't think it intended to say that all Nikons are duds, could be mistaken.

In the case of my Corvair Turbo Corsa convertible (rare car), well, it shared design and materials choices with all Corvairs of that era. Poor choice of pushrod tube o-ring material in mine, poor choice in all. Head bolts going directly into the block (crankcase, really) instead of into helicoils in mine, the same in all. And so on. Extending that view to other GM cars of the time, and other times too, requires outside information. There's quite a lot of it floating around. GM's cars have their fans but I've had difficulty finding anyone who'll speak in favor of build quality or intelligent design.

 

[flavio81]

People who haven't used a Nik'mat don't appreciate how much faster working cameras with the shutter speed control concentric with the lens are than cameras with the shutter speed control in the usual place on top of the body.

I disagree: This is what I like the least with the Nikkormats I've owned.

The Nikkormats certainly have more features and are, in my opinion, more robust but the Spotmatics do feel ever so nice in hand.
I own several of each...I like 'em all.

Agree. The spotmatics feel nicer than many cameras, even my "favorites" like the Canon new F-1 or the Nikon f2.

 

[flavio81]

Praise the Nikkormat and Nikomat!!

For me it's a guilty pleasure. I don't like how my Nikomat FTN has apparently brute vibrations when fired, and i don't like at all the shutter speed being around the ring and interfering with the lens release button on certain often-used speeds (1/15 etc); on the other hand i love it's toughness, good viewfinder and beautiful shutter sound. It gives you a feel of satisfaction.

One of my best pics was taken with a black FT2 so it has some sentimental meaning to me.

The electronic Nikkoramts I like a lot, and I regret selling my EL. I didn't like the "ping" shutter sound, everything else was nice!!

 

[E. von Hoegh]

Nikkormat FTn... I bought one used and it lasted for several rolls before the shutter refused to cock. Trashed it and sold the Nikkor 1.4/50mm lens attached to it. Heavy, noisy, bulky, not THAT reliable, I never tried to buy another one. End of the story with Nikon.

A friend asked me to look at the 1928 Ford A he'd bought.
Well. The fuel system leaked - with the exception of the then 89 year old tank, like a seive. The oil return tube leaked. The timing was way retarded (as were the geniouses who charged the seller $1100 for four sparkplugs, a battery, and a coil), the generator wasn't charging, the inlet and exhaust manifold gaskets leaked.
What a piece of crap!

 

[abruzzi]

I've generally found that the shutter speed adjuster on top of the camera is a lot less usable for me than a ring around the lens. The Nikkormat I can adjust without moving my hands from firing position, with the adjuster on top of the camera I have to remove my right hand from the shutter release and from firing position so that I can grip the shutter adjuster between my thumb and forefinger, so I can turn it. I've tried adjusting it with a single finger (some say thats how they do it) but every camera I own, its simply far too tight or my finger can't get enough traction to turn the ring.

 

[Down Under]

Nikkormat FTn... I bought one used and it lasted for several rolls before the shutter refused to cock. Trashed it and sold the Nikkor 1.4/50mm lens attached to it. Heavy, noisy, bulky, not THAT reliable, I never tried to buy another one. End of the story with Nikon.

As a longtime Nikkormat user (FTNs since 1972, now own three ELs, two FT2s), I say let's forgive this guy - I mean, he's from Saskatchewan.

I know of what I speak, as one who was born in New Brunswick...

Bad jokes done with, any camera has a learning curve. After six to ten rolls of film and even with a few predictable disasters, you get used to how Nikkormats work and it's go go go from then on.

They load well, are as tough as water buffalos, almost never break down, and use the wonderful old Nikon F mount Nikkors mostly available dirt-cheaply on Ebay or other sites. Almost entirely win-win-win!!

 

[Helge]

I have an FT that is in just lovely condition.
Meter is working, hardly a scratch and the advance is buttery smooth.

But the mirror bounces like crazy when it returns.

Is this a fault?

I have heard conflicting advice and stories in this.

I also have an FTN2 that has much less mirror bounce.

I tried recording a slow motion video of the mirror return, and it bounces up and down three times almost half the way up again the first time.

It’s hardly a problem from an image quality point of view, since it is after the shutter has closed, but it still sounds silly with a “boing” sound, and you invariably worry that it is wearing the mirror mechanism out.

Is it the mirror break that needs adjustment, or is it meant to sound like that on the earliest of the Nikkormats?