Review: Nikon F3

As I have chosen Nikon as my primary camera “platform”, it only makes sense to have some film bodies to use with my growing collection of F-Mount lenses. While my N80 is a great film body, it doesn’t meter with non-chipped, manual focus lenses. And shooting with it is more like shooting with a full-frame digital than with a traditional manual-focus film body. So when a pre-owned F3HP came my way, I welcomed the opportunity to add it to my trove of working collectibles.

Shooting with the F3 feels like shooting film. Its size, weight and form factor contribute greatly to this, but its high-eye point viewfinder with split-image/microprism focusing screen provides an experience unlike that of today’s digital autofocus bodies. While you can add aftermarket manual focusing screens to many current cameras, nothing does honor to manual focus like a classic manual-focus body.

The F3 puts you more in touch with your film roots. This is mostly due to how if feels in the hand, and the solidness of the controls. New to this generation of SLRs is the provision of an integral “grip” which greatly helps you to deal with the heft of the camera, but does not feel like the motor-drive like grips of the DSLRs.

Every camera has something it does particularly well, and in the case of the F3, it’s long exposure. The metering system has a wide range, and the electronic shutter a “T” mode in addition to the traditional “B” (Bulb) mode. This allows you to trip the shutter, and keep it open without consuming battery power, until the shutter speed dial is moved to a different position. Manually, the shutter speed can be set up to 8 seconds, but in Aperture Priority Auto, the F3 will calculate an exposure out to about 30 seconds, comparable with today’s DSLRs.


Overall Design
Except for the grip the F3 has a fairly classic SLR form factor, at least for Nikons, which are characteristically asymmetrical. The grip or “take-up” side of Nikons tends to be a little longer than the left side. This has trickled down to their DSLRs as well, and is now a characteristic shared by most digital cameras in general.

However, this is the first generation of Nikons to be designed by Giorgetto Guigaro, and so has a few new styling cues making a departure from some of those of the past.

The first of these is the classic red stripe, which survives today in the Cosina-built FM10. The stripe is part of the grip, which has become the norm in this new generation of cameras. It appears as a slight protrusion to the right side of the body, that helps to ease the pressure of one’s grip when supporting the substantial heft of the camera.

The next is the elimination of that classic lever on the front of the body to the right of the lens. Traditionally, this lever has been used for the self-timer, depth of field preview and/or mirror lockup (in the case of the original Canon F-1, all three!) But in an electronic-shutter camera such as the F3, it’s no longer necessary. In its place, closer to the lens, is a button/lever combo serving as the AE/Lock and mechanical shutter release backup. The latter is a significant feature, because in this new age of electronic shutters, reliability was questioned, so a mechanical backup was a necessary competitive feature. As it turned out, the efficiency and wide availability of batteries for the F3 assured its success. The self-timer switch has been moved to the top deck of the camera, concentric with the shutter speed dial, and the shutter release, rewind lever and power switch have been combined into a single assembly. The elegantly simple depth of preview/mirror lock up lever from the F2 is retained.

Otherwise, the F3 is very much a traditional manual-focus SLR, albeit a transitional one. The next, the F4, will be very different. A ground-breaking Auto-focus camera with a greatly different form factor that would become the paradigm of the modern DSLR.


Operation
The operation of the F3 is silky smooth, yet solid. It has a most gratifying shutter click and mirror slap, but the film advance really sets it apart. All those ball bearings make it hard to make out that there’s actually film in the camera. Setting the aperture with your left hand and the shutter speed with your right index finger is quite easy easy. Adjusting the exposure compensation a little tricky with the left hand only, but certainly easy enough with both. But what is very difficult is turning the camera on and off with the shutter-release concentric power switch. It’s extremely tight, and although fairly easy to turn off, very difficult to turn on. Fortunately, you can leave it on indefinitely, as power is not drawn until the shutter release is pressed halfway to activate the meter. This is my only real complaint about the camera. The self-timer switch is equally difficult, but used much less often and so less significant.

The F3 has an interesting little quirk. At first, it may seem to have an intermittent problem with metering. When you first load it with film, or just after the camera back has been opened, the -+ sign does not appear in the finder’s LCD in manual mode, and auto exposure doesn’t work in Aperture mode. Until you fire off three shots and move the film advance lever for the third time, metering does not become available. This is to prevent you from shooting on the leader and possibly encountering flares from light leaks. It’s one of the first signs of camera automation logic!

The viewfinder is amongst the best I’ve ever used. The ground-breaking use of an LCD for shutter speed and over/under exposure readout instead of LEDs extends battery life significantly (although I’ll take a good ol’ match-needle finder any day). In conjunction with the optical ADR (aperture direct readout, which consumes no power and adds no mechanics) it provides a full-information finder display.

My two chipped, manual focus Voigtländers work great with the F3. My two non-chipped Samyangs are also quite usable. The Samyang/ProOptic 8mm f/3.5 fisheye meters perfectly, although it’s designed for the APS-C format, and therefore its built-in, non-removeable shade crops the frame a little smaller. The Samyang/Phoenix 500mm f/8.0 also meters properly.

Necessories
Like many professional cameras with swappable finders, the F3 has no flash shoe. Instead, there’s a proprietary flash connector built into the rewind crank/iso/exposure compensation dial. This requires one of the following adapters:

AS-4 is the standard adapter that provides a non-TTL hot shoe. Any flash that can function in “Auto Aperture” mode can be used with this setup. The adapter must be removed to access the rewind crank.

AS-17 is a TTL adapter, which allows you to use the Through-the-Lens metering capability of the F3.

And if you have a dedicated F3 flash, the AS-6 is what you need to convert it for use with a standard hot shoe.

Off camera flash
Of course, it’s always possible to use non-TTL off-camera flash using a PC cord and a flash bracket. For TTL off-camera flash, you could use the AS-17 in conjunction with the SC-28 or SC-29 flash cord.

Eyepiece
My F3 came with a 0.5 diopter eyepiece, which I cannot use. If yours is missing, you can order The Nikon DK-17, which is a 22mm, rubber-covered ring with a multicoated neutral optic. You can then add the DK-19 eyecup to this if you need to. These parts are still current and available through B&H Photo/Video.

A Little History
At the time this camera was produced, the 1971 Canon F-1 was the current professional model; a manual, match-needle camera with an add-on finder (Servo EE Finder) which provided shutter-priority auto exposure. Two years prior to the F3, Canon introduced the A-1, a semi-professional model quite comparable to the F3, but without swappable finders and a fabric curtain shutter with a one-stop slower maximum speed. However, it was an industry first with all four shooting modes, Program, Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority and Manual. The year after the introduction of the F3, Canon introduced the New F1, an updated version of the 1971 version, still manual exposure, with an available AE Finder FN which would provide Aperture-Priority AE. It wouldn’t be until 1983 that Nikon would introduce a camera fully comparable to the 1978 Canon A-1, but which improves upon it with a much more user friendly interface compared to the confusing A-1.

There were six distinct variants of the F3; the original F3; the popular F3HP with its high-eyepoint viewfinder; The F3/T, a natural-finish titanium version of the F3HP; The F3H, a high-speed pellicle-mirror model capable of up to 13fp; The F3P, with additional weather sealing for press applications; and finally the F3AF, Nikon’s first autofocus SLR.

In 1991, the F3 was the basis of the world’s first 1.3MP digital SLR, produced by Kodak as the DCS 100.