Awesome and Affordable: The Nikon N8008S

For those of us who enjoy photography, we’re living in fortunate times. In the digital world, there is a wide variety of choices; DSLRs, mirrorless cameras and even super high quality cameras in our smartphones. For analog photography, we’re lucky to have a good selection of interesting film stocks to choose from and amazing old film cameras for sale, albeit at higher prices than a few years ago.

On a recent quest to find an autofocus camera or two to add to my arsenal, I picked up a bargain—a very lightly used Nikon N8008S 35mm SLR with a Nikkor AF-D 28-85mm f3.5-4.5 lens for $95. The Nikon N8008S was the successor to the N8008 which was introduced in 1988. The N8008 was Nikon’s top advanced amateur camera at the time, positioned right below the flagship professional F4. The camera was priced just under $900 at introduction. That’s over $2300 in today’s dollars adjusted for inflation! The N8008S debuted in 1991 and added spot metering to its list of features. I say all this because it’s quite amazing that one can buy such a very capable and at one time, a very expensive camera, for under a hundred bucks today. The lens was basically free.

My Nikon N8008S with 50mm F/1.8 AF-D lens

I call cameras of this era “technoblobs”—big bulky heavy hunks of plastic covered metal. Nikon, Canon and Minolta all had similar looking cameras and they certainly don’t fit the mold of what we consider a retro camera today. The Canon AE-1, Nikon F3 or Pentax K1000 might better represent what today’s retro camera enthusiast is seeking and that’s why prices on those cameras have soared making technoblob cameras a relative bargain.

The N8008S is a very capable, feature packed camera. It offers several shooting modes—full program, shutter priority, aperture priority and manual. Its early generation autofocus offers two modes—continuous servo and single servo. The autofocus is noisy by today’s standards, but fast and precise. The camera’s meter offers up matrix, center-weighted and spot. You can shoot at shutter speeds from 30 seconds up to 1/8000th of a second.

You control all of the camera’s functions with a thumbwheel and most photographers can figure out how to drive the N8008S pretty quickly without looking at the owner’s manual. Film loading is easy, just drop in a film cartridge, pull the leader over the red line, close the back and tap the shutter release once. The Nikon advances the film to the first frame. Depending on the mode you choose, the N8008S can burn through a roll of film in as fast as 3.3 frames per second.

The N8008S is not a camera for someone who wants to fully immerse themselves in full manual control of their photography. Rather, this is a camera that you relax and just have fun with. Put it in program mode and let the camera do all of the heavy lifting for you and just click away. By the time this camera came out, Nikon had really nailed TTL metering and I had a hard time coming up with a situation where the N8008S didn’t deliver near perfect exposure. Over a couple of weeks, I shot two expired rolls of film—some Fuji 400 and Kodak T-Max 100. I used the Nikkor zoom and my 50mm f/1.8 AF-D lens. Here’s puppy day at our local park.

My roll of Kodak expired in 2021 but it’s been kept in the fridge. I was shooting some portraits with my Fujifilm X-T1 and brought along the N8008S as well. Between set ups, I just clicked away.

The shot below was made with the N8008S and an off-camera Vivitar 283 flash for fill.

It’s crazy to think about the fact that you can buy what was at the time, one of the most advanced cameras in the world for nearly nothing today. As I write this, there are N8008S bodies on eBay for as little as $20. While it may not have the charm of shooting a Nikon F2, Pentax Spotmatic or Olympus OM-1, this era of camera represents a truly remarkable value in analog photography.