Hi- I don’t want to sound too harsh but I had a couple FAs when I was a newspaper shooter - I liked the style and features, but immediately found them to be maybe the most unreliable Nikon I’d ever used. They would just stop dead at the worst times. And this was what, 30+ years ago when they were new? By contrast I still have my first beater F3, a couple Nikkormats, N90s etc that are all still chugging along! Just one user’s experience…
Hi- I don’t want to sound too harsh but I had a couple FAs when I was a newspaper shooter - I liked the style and features, but immediately found them to be maybe the most unreliable Nikon I’d ever used. They would just stop dead at the worst times. And this was what, 30+ years ago when they were new? By contrast I still have my first beater F3, a couple Nikkormats, N90s etc that are all still chugging along! Just one user’s experience…
I'm coming to the conversation late, but my experience echos this. When I first "went pro" in the late-1980s, I wanted to start with three identical bodies. The FA had recently been replaced in Nikon's product line by the N8008, and the F3 replaced by the F4. I couldn't at the time afford any of those - N8008, F3, F4 - but my local shop had three used FA's that had been traded in and were very affordable. So I snapped up all three as my starter kit. Oh my, what unreliable cameras, I had trouble with all of them. Mostly frequent shutter failures, though one had some issue where the DOF preview button would actually trip the shutter via some sort of electronic short. That is, if I pressed the DOF preview button, it acted as a second shutter button and I had to advance the film. I had previously used Pentax cameras, which I traded for the Nikons and a few AIs lenses, and I almost immediately wished I'd just stayed put with my Pentax gear.
Anyway, after the FAs had all had their turns in the shop, I eventually made enough to replace them one-by-one with an F3 and two FM2s. Those all lasted for many, many years.