Nikon FA Question

I recently came into possession of a Nikon FA. When playing around with it, I noticed that there is no backlight for the small screen at the upper-left inside the finder, which displays the exposure reading. During the day there is no issue because light shines through the semi-clear box on the top-front of the finder, lighting up the display inside of it. At night, however, it is absolutely impossible to see that display, given there is no light to light it up. Has anyone experienced this issue as well, or do I have an issue with my finder?

This is not an isseu, it is a "feature" ..;)

Sorry, sometimes i cannot help myself..

 

Anyway, one solution is lighting it up by using a miniature car-key light in front of the lcd illumination window, but that only workds wel when on a tripod or other type of support otherwise you need an extra hand i guess..

I did a load of rummaging around the usual sites to try to check whether there was a backlight, and only really found Wikipedia pointing out that there wasn't. (It's annoying that it's hard to find documentation for something that doesn't exist.)

 

The facetious argument would be that if it's too dark to see the LCD, how were you going to take a photo? But practically, I agree with CPM. I imagine this could be annoying if you're trying to use an FA for astrophotography (waving even a small LED flashlight around will ruin your night vision, and I dislike that you can't turn off some of the viewfinder illumination on a dSLR - or indeed the running lights on my car - for that reason).

 

Pleased to hear you've found one that's otherwise working, though. While I grew up with digital Nikons, I have a vague soft spot for the capabilities of the FA, and have mostly been scared off by the reports of how many don't work.

I recently came into possession of a Nikon FA.

My condolences.

Sell it quick before the shutter packs up!

It doesn't have a viewfinder display panel light. At the time, Nikon was smoking something that made them so terrified of battery drain that the displays of the F3 and FA were perversely designed for ultra-low power draw leading to low visibility. The F3 does have a weak panel light, activated by a microscopic inconvenient momentary button that rarely turns the light on (possibly the least-loved feature of a beloved camera). Instead of improving this with the later FA, Nikon elected to omit the internal light entirely. o_O

 

The easiest workaround would be clipping one of the very small LED lights sold as party favors to your neckstrap: these are barely larger than the aspirin size battery they run on. Or get one that has an elastic loop, so it can be worn as a ring. Such a light could also be epoxied to a plastic slide-in flash shoe cover, perhaps in a way that it could be folded down over front prism panel when needed. I sometimes carry one of these little LED thingies to light up the meter needle panels and mechanical shutter/aperture readouts in old Nikon F / F2 meter prisms.

Edited April 22, 2020 by orsetto

It doesn't have a viewfinder display panel light. At the time, Nikon was smoking something that made them so terrified of battery drain that the displays of the F3 and FA were perversely designed for ultra-low power draw leading to low visibility. The F3 does have a weak panel light, activated by a microscopic inconvenient momentary button that rarely turns the light on (possibly the least-loved feature of a beloved camera). Instead of improving this with the later FA, Nikon elected to omit the internal light entirely.

 

I hate to keep beating the drum that I think that the Canon New F-1 was a better camera than the F3, but it was :)

 

Among the other great features of the New F-1, the little selector knob on the back had a position marked "Light." When set to that position, tapping the shutter button would activate a light that illuminated the match-needle meter(which also nicely shows you the set aperture on the lens) and shutter speed brilliantly but not blindingly, and it would stay on for 8 seconds.

 

Since Canon opted to use the beefier PX-28 battery in the New F-1(and virtually all other electronic manual advance cameras) they could get away with stuff that used a bit more power without worrying so much about the battery. That's generally a great battery with a lot of camera applications from many makers, and it's a shame Nikon only saw fit to squeeze it under the mirror on the EL and EL2.

I hate to keep beating the drum that I think that the Canon New F-1 was a better camera than the F3, but it was :)

 

Among the other great features of the New F-1, the little selector knob on the back had a position marked "Light." When set to that position, tapping the shutter button would activate a light that illuminated the match-needle meter(which also nicely shows you the set aperture on the lens) and shutter speed brilliantly but not blindingly, and it would stay on for 8 seconds.

 

Since Canon opted to use the beefier PX-28 battery in the New F-1(and virtually all other electronic manual advance cameras) they could get away with stuff that used a bit more power without worrying so much about the battery. That's generally a great battery with a lot of camera applications from many makers, and it's a shame Nikon only saw fit to squeeze it under the mirror on the EL and EL2.

 

I didn't know much about the F1 back in the days but now I study about it I found its designed is too complex so I don't like it. The complexity of the F1 has to do with providing meter manual with FD lenses. Also having the Av mode built in to the body but requires a special viewfinder to use it. Also a mixed of mechanical and electronic controlled shutter speed. I like the F3 because it's a very simple design. But then I don't like the FA either because really Nikon run into problem to make the AI/AI-s lenses work with S and P mode. At the very least you lose aperture display when using P mode.

At the very least you lose aperture display when using P mode.

 

Huh - I may not have realised that. I might have expected it to work with AI-S lenses, if not AI (since if I remember the FA correctly it had a closed-loop "move the aperture lever until the meter is right" thing for AI lenses, whereas on AI-S it can be open-loop because of the linear aperture). Does the DS-2 (the F2 thingy for turning the aperture ring on AI lenses automatically) tell you what aperture it's going to select?

Huh - I may not have realised that. I might have expected it to work with AI-S lenses, if not AI (since if I remember the FA correctly it had a closed-loop "move the aperture lever until the meter is right" thing for AI lenses, whereas on AI-S it can be open-loop because of the linear aperture). Does the DS-2 (the F2 thingy for turning the aperture ring on AI lenses automatically) tell you what aperture it's going to select?

 

The LCD is so small that there's just no place for it to display more than one value.

 

Regardless of the way the information was output, this, IMO, was the biggest deficit of Nikon's early program bodies. The FA only had the one small LCD, the FG just had the LED dots to show the shutter speed, and the N2000/N2020 had the illuminated shutter speed scale on the right.

 

The N6006, N8008, and F4 generation bodies remedied this with an early form of the now-ubiquitous bottom LCD with room for the shutter speed, aperture, and AF indicators. The A-1, which I think Nikon was trying to emulate with the FA(and in a way one-up with the better meter), had a full grouping of 8-segment displays under the viewfinder while the T70 and T90 moved to a full blown LCD showing both pieces of information. The AE-1 Program was as crippled as the Nikon bodies in Program mode, and only shows the camera selected aperture. The Minolta X700 only shows the shutter speed(it uses an equivalent to Nikon's ADR system to show the aperture in manual and aperture priority, and of course is locked at minimum aperture in program).

 

I always think that it's interesting to look at how different manufacturers approached these early multi-mode cameras.

Edited April 22, 2020 by ben_hutcherson

Does the DS-2 (the F2 thingy for turning the aperture ring on AI lenses automatically) tell you what aperture it's going to select?

 

The DS-1, DS-2 and DS-12 EE aperture servos for the F2S, F2SB and F2AS operate on a slight lag, combined with the non-electronic aperture readout in the viewfinder and non-digital meter display there is no way for the system to predict or display what the correct aperture will be before it is set. It varies moment to moment in real time as the light changes: the servo-mechanical aperture ring interface can take anywhere from a quarter second to two full seconds to drive the aperture where it needs to be.

 

Bear in mind the entire system was incredibly advanced for the time it was designed, but it was proposed in 1969 and didn't actually ship until late 1972. Electronic metering as we know it from the later '70s was impossible at that point, so the meter circuit + display + servo operates very crudely as an electromechanical nulling system. Nikon received a lot of criticism for the required 1972-1976 DP-2 meter prism having only a basic uninformative "unprofessional" two LED idiot light exposure display, when other far cheaper cams like Fujica ST-801 had a discrete seven step LED display.

 

What the "just two lights?" critics didn't understand was the DP-2 meter was never originally intended to be sold without the EE servo as an "F2S" camera model: meter + servo were meant to be a complete but separate accessory kit only used when a specialized photographer specifically needed AE functionality (with motor drive unattended etc). The simplified yes/no up/down meter display lights were integral to operating the servo: they show which direction the aperture ring needs to turn to bring exposure to null, indicated by both lights turning on simultaneously, which cuts power to the servo and sets correct exposure. When the light changed and one light went out, the servo would adjust the aperture to get a null cutoff once again. This was about as complex as such a system could be at the time: since it worked by constantly chasing an active null point, it could not predictively display where it was heading. The updated DP-3/F2SB and DP-12/F2AS had faster SBC meter cells and slicker five-step triple-LED meter readout, which were a tad more predictive since it showed when you were within range of +- one stop of proper exposure before it got there.

 

For all practical purposes, it worked identically to a photographer turning the aperture ring manually to center the meter needle in the standard F/F2 meter prisms. In manual shutter priority metering, you set a shutter speed, then your hand turns the aperture ring to null the meter: the EE servo motor turns the aperture ring exactly the same way per the meter prism direction signal. At that point the mechanical aperture number viewfinder display linked to the aperture ring position would show you the correct aperture, but it cannot do this until the meter is actually nulled.

Edited April 22, 2020 by orsetto

Like many of deceptively simple things, a lot harder to describe than watch. Sover Wong used to have a video of the EE servo in action on his great F2 site, but the link is broken. This F2AS DS-12 clip from youTube should get the concept across better than my five paragraphs. From some lucky collector's showcase with all the additional toys incl 250 exp back and AC powered intervalometer:

 

Both Canon and Nikon made peculiar non-intuitive design decisions when they updated their flagship pro cameras after their '70s heyday. As Bebu notes, the Canon "new" F-1 had a more visible, more informative viewfinder display but everything else about its design seemed to come from the engineers at Citroen (with a dash of Lego thrown in). It tried to combine the simplicity and ruggedness of the legendary original F-1 with the too-quirky-by-half ethos of their multi-mode A-1. No one really knew what to make of it: original F-1 pros scratched their heads, Nikon F2 pros were baffled. So the Nikon F3 took the lead and ran with it almost by default: Canon enthusiasts carped that the F3 was dated and dumbed down and only sold like hotcakes because of all the pre-existing Nikon lenses people owned, but it was more than that. Flawed as it was in execution, the F3 was instantly comprehensible to anyone who picked it up, while the Canon New F-1 was a bit of a stumper. It didn't help that the New F-1 adopted the AE-1/ A-1 "amateur" body style cues: that began looking dated real fast as the '80s progressed, while the F3 seemed timeless. Eye appeal still drove a lot of camera purchasing thirty five years ago.

 

What killed the F3 for some of us was the dinky, uninformative LCD meter display (same one the FA has). It screams "prototype" - Nikon would normally never have released such a thing before massaging it further, but must have got caught up in the idea it would make a great marketing tool ("first LCD display in a camera") if rushed as-is. History has proven them correct, at least financially: most photographers glued the thing to "auto" and barely ever glanced at the display, so it sold extremely well. The problem for some of us who do rely heavily on the display is it wasn't really any better than ye old needle on shutter speed scale readout of the EL and FE, and in some ways worse. For reasons only they know, Nikon decided the excellent battery life of high-visibility LED-scale cameras like the Pentax ME "wasn't good enough" for a pro body, yet the needle scale was "too passe" so they settled on the flawed four digit LCD panel we then got stuck with for 20 years of Nikon F3 production. If it had just been widened a bit to allow the same five-step - O + manual exposure mode readout of the older F2AS/FM, instead of vestigial microscopic binary + - over the shutter speed number, we complainers would have jumped right on it despite the visibility issues in low light.

Edited April 22, 2020 by orsetto

Does the DS-2 (the F2 thingy for turning the aperture ring on AI lenses automatically) tell you what aperture it's going to select?

 

No because they are true servo system which work on error. It connected to the meter and see if the meter indicates + or - and turn the aperture ring in the right direction until the meter indicates 0. Of course you can see the aperture in the viewfinder changes and then stops.

Thanks all. I was always amused by the DS servos - not that I expected them to work very well (some of my aperture rings are a bit stiff, for a start), but a commendable way to retrofit the technology. Until the idea of variably controlling the aperture lever was practical, anyway.

 

No because they are true servo system which work on error. It connected to the meter and see if the meter indicates + or - and turn the aperture ring in the right direction until the meter indicates 0. Of course you can see the aperture in the viewfinder changes and then stops.

 

I'm being stupid; so "yes you can tell the aperture" - because the camera has already moved the aperture ring to the right point, and you can see that in the finder. (The "you can't tell until the camera stops down" thing from a camera-controlled aperture lever doesn't apply, because the lens is metering wide open with the aperture ring moved appropriately.) This comes from being a newbie with no Nikon older than my F5. (Except technically my E-series 50mm, which is a Nikon rather than a Nikkor.)