When the mechanical and fully-manual FM2 35mm SLR arrived in 1982, it quickly found an enthusiastic following among professional photographers still suspcious of the F3’s automation. Of course, it helped that its top shutter speed was 1/4000 second – a world first – and that, with the MD-12 motordrive bolted on, it could do 3.5 fps (which was pretty fast at the time). This combo became the standard kit for a great many sports and news photographers, and kept Nikon on top in these sectors for quite a while. Over 1.3 million FM2s were sold (mostly the later FM2N version with the higher flash sync speed of 1/250 second) and, thanks to its exceptional durability, a good few of them are still knocking around today.
With the 35mm film camera revival seemingly destined to really take off in the next year or so, the FM2 would certainly be a great candidate for Nikon to consider reviving, but for today’s working photographers the Z f is arguably the better option. It looks and feels like an FM2, but under the skin is a digital mirrorless camera with all mod cons such as subject-detection AF, 30 fps shooting for JPEGs and 4K video.
Nikon has done a couple of retro-styled digital cameras in past – the Df DSLR in 2013, and the Z fc ‘APS-C’ mirrorless camera in 2021. The full frame Z f is certainly the best executed of them as, in particular, the proportions look right and there’s a much closer resemblence to the film camera that’s inspired its design.
On the inside, the Z f is essentially the Z 6II with a few of the more recent Z 8’s upgrades thrown in for good measure, including the later-generation (and faster) ‘Expeed 7’ processor which adds some significant performance enhancements.
As with the Z fc, there’s a choice of insert colours, and these coverings include the EVF housing, replicating the distinctive look of the pentaprism housings on the original Nikkormat FT all the way through to the last-of-the-line FM3A (which, by the way was introduced in 2001). Additionally, the faceplate replicates the shape and the ‘Nikon’ period lettering introduced with the FM in 1977 when the Ai – Automatic (Maximum Aperture) Indexing – lenses also arrived, ending the ritual of racking the lens’s aperture collar from the smallest aperture to the largest so a coupling pin on the camera body relayed this information to the metering system.
You’re definitely going to be tempted by the idea of using 35mm SLR and full frame DSLR lenses on the Z f because they look more at home here than on any other Z mount body. An AF-S lens works as it would on any autofocus F mount body, but the earlier AF Nikkor lenses were driven from the camera body so you’ll have to focus manually on the Z f. Some third-party G mount lenses – i.e. without an aperture collar – may require a firmware upgrade for auto oe even manual aperture control. With the MF lenses there’s no auto aperture control so you’ll have use aperture-priority auto exposure control or full manual… just like with an FE or FE2. However, subject recognition is actually available with manual focus (more about this shortly) and a focus peaking display which is a very effective MF assist plus, of course, in-body image stabilisation works with any lens regardless of its age.
Ready And Steady
The Z f’s BSI-type CMOS sensor has an effective pixel count of 24.5 million, giving a maximum image size of 6048x4032 pixels with a choice of two smaller sizes for both JPEG and RAW capture. However, 10-bit HEIF capture is added to the mix as per the Z 8 and, also similar to this model, the main RAW capture settings are ‘High Efficiency’ and ‘High Efficiency*’ along with a conventional lossless compressed option. The ‘High Efficiency’ settings employs a more efficient form of lossy compression – essentially using the H.265 video codec – to deliver close to the same image quality as an uncompressed RAW file, but at either one-third or one-half the file size.
The JPEGs and
