New chinese Nikon FM clone

The Phenix DN60 has an *all metal body* and a Nikon AI

bayonet. Is has a *mechanical shutter* with a top speed of

1/2000 sec. Shortest sync. sime is 1/125 sec. Looks very much

like a Nikon FM with a diffrerent (uglier) top. More info - in

swedish - can be found at

www.photax.se/kmrr/phenix/dn60/phenixdn60.htm. The price is

about 305 Euros. Why not..?

/Fredrik

Interesting. I think it is based on the Cosina FM-10 body. It looks very much like the <a href="http://www.camerahobby.com/Review-FX2000.html">Yashica FX-3 super 2000</a> (also Cosina). The film chamber looks very 'cosina' as well. "All metal" sounds better than the plasticy FM-10, but I personally think that I would prefeer to go 2nd hand and get the real thing if price was an issue.

I used to live in China. Phenix cameras are garbage with very poor quality control. Perhaps the base body is the same in many if not all ways to a Nikon FM and may even be made by the same contract manufaturer for both but I'm willing to bet that Nikon does thorough quality control inspections and rejects some number of them. Guess where the rejects go? It may be a fine camera but reliability may be an issue.

It looks more like an FM10 clone than an FM2 clone, to me.

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There's no ADR window that I can see on the front of the prism,

so it looks like there's no display of aperture in the viewfinder.

I can't tell if it even displays shutter speed in the finder, actually.

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I'd be hard pressed to think of a worse place for the PC socket,

right under your thumb when winding the camera. And it's not

the nice screw-lock socket that's present on the real Nikons.

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The film chamber doesn't have the nice rollers to guide the

film the way higher end Nikon cameras do.

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The hot shoe doesn't have a contact for a viewfinder ready light,

so I'd assume there is none.

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There doesn't appear to be any DoF preview (the button on the

front seems to be for multiple exposures, if my limited Swedish

abilities are correct).

<p>

I can't tell how the back opens, but it doesn't appear to

have the safety lock around the rewind knob that the FM/FM2 has.

<p>

It doesn't appear to be the right size/shape for an MD-12, and

I can't see any evidence that it has any motor drive capability.

<p>

Of course, one can't judge build quality much from a few photos

on a web page, so I won't say it's bad, but I don't have any

evidence that it's really good, either.

Um, Niels, the FX3 Super is an improved FX3. If I recall correctly, the FX3 came out decades before the FM10. It may now be made by Cosina, but I don't think it is their design.

 

I'm not sure you should believe everything you find on the 'net.

 

Cheers,

 

Dan

Dan,<br>

It is of course possible that the Yashica mentioned is not of Cosina origin, but from appearence and specifications I think it is based on the same design. Cosina has used the same design for quite some years even before the FM-10 was introduced (eg. Canon T60 = early 90's) but I wouldn't know if the design originally comes from Cosina.

Most Japanese Manufactures has used this basic design for producing either a mechanical or a electronic (like the FE-10) entry camera at some point. It is possible that the manufactures do the final assembly themselves in order to claim it is their own.<br>

If you consider the selling price of these cameras (the FM-10 is sold new from B&H at $210 w. the zoom lens!) then it does not make economic sense to start from scratch to make this type of basic camera, which makes it very probable that these cameras has a common origin regardless of what the manufactures wants us to believe.

Considering the price, it is unlikely that it is fully manufactured in Japan. Parts are more likely manufactured and subassembled in eg. China, and are probably finally assembled in Japan in order to get the "made in Japan" label.