Nikon F6 Review

[Duncan J Murray]

Hi all,

I have written a recent review on the Nikon F6 for those of you interested. With the recent resurgence of interest in 35mm film, and the F6 being one of the few new SLRs you can still buy, I thought I'd give my impression of this camera after using it for nearly a year.

http://www.duncandheff.com/NikonF6.html

I hope you find it useful.

All best,
Duncan.

 

[CT]

Nice review, and actually made me feel slightly jealous.

 

[photon]

Duncan, you say you don't care for flash, and the low sync speed of the LX could be a major annoyance for anyone going retro (yet wouldn't be a problem with an even older TLR).

If comparisons do have to be made with the older Pentax, at a basic level, how about the ergonomics of the lens mount? Nikon seem to me to have things the wrong way round.

 

[Duncan J Murray]

CT - cheers no need to be jealous - just ask my neck which camera it prefers!

photon : yes, not so keen on flash - on camera flash has never really worked for me, off camera flash has given me better results, but it's so unpredictable I wouldn't experiment on film with it. Instead I've meddled with my g/f's K10D and an AF280T flash (very experimental given the lack of off camera flash capabilities of the AF280T!).

Yes - the lens mount is confusing! It's fine once you figure out that you simply have to use the opposite hands, but now I get confused when mounting Pentax lenses! Maybe I'll put out a review of the Pentax LX and Super-A sometime. If you're asking about Pentax versus Nikon ergonomics - I would put Pentax first. The hyper-program and hyper-manual modes are genius, not to mention that the mount technology of Pentax is much more congruous than Nikon. The addition of the 'A' setting on Pentax lenses was genius and allows for the superb mode selection of the Super-A and MZ-S among other cameras. Nikon went through some bizarre mount changes - first the rabbit ears, then 'AI', then AI with extra lugs to communicate gross focal length and max and min apertures. I think only two Nikon cameras use this feature, and yet it remains on all lenses! Then they introduced the CPU lenses and that seems to have sorted things out a bit. Pentax lens mount technology doesn't seem to have any dead-ends, they had a lot of foresight in their planning I think. However, shame there is no aperture detection on modern bodies.

Despite saying all of this, it doesn't impact on the F6 - it's a great camera which works well. I could do with hyper-manual and hyper-program, but I won't fuss about it!

Duncan.

 

[photon]

Cheers, I'll have to try swapping the hands I use with my Fuji S5. The Fuji's ergonomics aren't a patch on my Pentax DSLRs, even down to the size of readout on the top LCD panel.

I've got an LX and my K-mounts go back to the KX (have three!). Probably using US model numbers, but the most recent film cameras I had were PZ-1p (need to carry the manual at all times) and MZ-5n (virtually unused 2nd-hand, but the mirror return motor failed after a fortnight).