The Nikon FE

I have a soft spot in my heart for cameras from the mid to late 1970s. It was then, during my junior high and high school years, when the seeds of my lifelong passion for photography were planted. These were the days when schools had camera clubs and we had a lively group of kids mostly shooting borrowed cameras from their parents or loaner cameras from the schools. I used my father’s Kodak Retina IIc rangefinder, but I lusted after Nikons.

Many people consider the 70s the glory years for Nikon. Their legendary Nikon F and the brand new F2 were the cameras of choice for legions of professional photographers. And in 1977, they introduced the FM, the first of the compact-F series designed to compete with the Olympus OM-1 and OM-2 which were romancing photographers with their compact size. In addition to wanting smaller, lighter camera bodies, the market also was moving towards exposure automation, so in 1978, Nikon introduced the FE.

The Nikon FE with 50mm f/1.8 AI-s pancake lens

The Nikon FE was essentially an FM with aperture-priority auto exposure. It’s a simple, durable, dependable camera with a top shutter speed of 1/1000th of a second. A camera made mostly of metal, available in chrome or all black, the FE was manufactured from 1978 to 1983 when the FE2 replaced it. The FE2 offered shutter speeds up to 1/4000th of a second.

I usually start my quest for a new camera on eBay, but on a hunch, I reached out to my friend Jim Holman at International Camera Technicians to ask if he had an FE for sale. Jim knows I am picky about the condition of the used cameras I buy and said he did not have a minty one in stock. He did however have a user condition body in the shop and would be willing to give it a complete overhaul and then replace top and bottom covers and other parts to essentially create a mint FE. That sounded sweet so I gave Jim the ok. The camera arrived a few weeks later, looking, smelling and operating just like it was brand new.

The FE and FE2 Nikons have my all time favorite viewfinder displays, just a simple analog needle readout that shows the shutter speed the camera has decided on for the aperture the photographer has selected. In manual mode, it’s a simple match-needle affair. Top of the viewfinder offers an ADR—Aperture Direct Readout, which is basically a little window that show the aperture selected on the lens barrel. Honestly, I think that the Nikon F3 would have been the world’s most perfect camera if it had the display used in the FE/FE2 and later FM3a.

The FE is pure simple analog joy to shoot. There’s a quality feel to all of the controls. The viewfinder is big and bright and easy to focus. The shutter sounds sublime. And it’s honestly hard to mess up a shot with Nikon’s classic center-weighted metering.

Cockpit of the FE: Everything you need and nothing you don’t

To round out my FE kit, I went looking for what has been called one of Nikon’s sharpest manual focus lenses; the 50mm f/1.8 AI-s Pancake. There are various version of this lens, but all of my research led to selecting the version sold originally only in Japan. These lenses have serial numbers starting with a 2. The USA version from the 1980s has more plastic, serial numbers starting with a 4 and only focuses to 2’ compared to the earlier version’s 1.5’. There was a also a much cheaper Series E version of this lens. All of the Nikon 50s are amazing lenses, but this one kept coming up as the sharpest of all. I bought mine from a trusted seller in Japan. I do love how compact this lens is…makes for a nice, lightweight kit. And it is really hard to beat the quality of Nikon’s manual focus AI-s lenses.

I shot some Kodak T-Max 100 as my first roll in the FE.

I really enjoyed shooting the FE and with the little 50/1.8 Nikkor out front, it feels like a camera I could carry more often and make more pictures. That would be a good thing. My goal is to make more pictures this year.

As a footnote, prices for film cameras have skyrocketed over the past 18 months. It makes me wish I had invested some money and bought more cameras ten years ago when they were almost free so I could sell them today, get rich and retire. Oh well. That being said, the Nikon FE, as of this writing, is still a bargain with prices hovering around $100. Find a decent one and then invest in a CLA and this is a camera you could happily shoot forever.