Review: Nikon F65 camera, shooting film in the digital age

▼ Earlier this week I got myself a Nikon F65 camera. The F65 is a single lens reflex 35 mm film camera that Nikon sold from 2001 to around 2005. You can get these second hand for next to nothing these days; I even saw one at the not-very-cheap photo store for € 35. Sure, you have to pay for batteries and film, so using one of these costs some money, but owning one is very cheap. The F65 was never a high end camera, though: the construction is all plastic, and the viewfinder is not great. The plastic construction is not a problem, however, this is what makes the F65 so much lighter than any Nikon DSLR at a hair over 400 grams.

This camera does everything you need and very little that you don't. Although the design is more than a decade old, it still has all the important features you'll find on modern cameras: matrix metering, an auto mode as well as the P/A/S/M modes and even five scene modes. It has a built-in pop-up flash. Just set the mode dial to auto or P (if you don't want any flash) and give it to anyone and they'll shoot great pictures with it. The F65 is much less intimidating than a hulking DSLR with three times the buttons.

The F65 lacks many of the complex settings found on a camera like the D7100, partly because many of them only apply to digital and partly because the F65 is a simpler camera. But that's fine, I'm not going to experiment with advanced techniques on film. That's where digital shines with its immediate feedback.

Even film loading is simple: just put in the film cartridge and pull the film towards the winding spool. Close the back, and the camera takes it from there. When the roll full, it rewinds automatically.

The F65 shares the above with its little sibling, the F55. However, the F65 is a much, much better deal. Unlike the F55, the F65 supports the ML-L3 infrared remote that also works with the D7100. More importantly, the F65 works with all of Nikon's autofocus lenses, so you can use your modern AF-S lenses on it. The VR (vibration reduction) even works! (Although I fear for the life of the two rather small and non-rechargeable CR2 batteries that power the F65.)

Now I hear you thinking "that's nice, but all my current lenses are DX lenses that aren't compatible with film". Turns out DX lenses, which are made for cameras like the D7100, which have an image sensor that is smaller than the 35 mm film frame, are not entirely unusable on film cameras. When I mounted my 35 mm f/1.8 DX lens on the F65, the viewfinder image didn't show any dark corners. However, the viewfinder only shows 89% of the image that ends up on film, and the result on film looks like this:

So not usable, I'd say. (At least, if you want to print the old fashioned way. If you scan the negatives, you can always crop away the dark corners.) Next, I tried the 18-55 VR II lens. The image on the left is zoomed to 18 mm, the middle one 24 mm, where once again things looked good through the viewfinder, and the image on the left was taken zoomed to 35 mm.

The 24 mm image stil has dark corners, but at 35 mm everything's fine. So this lens is actually completely usable at 35 mm—probably even a bit wider, like 28 or 30 mm.

Next up, my Tamron 10-24 mm lens at 10, 13 and 14 mm, respectively:

This is a fantastic result: 14 mm on film is actually slightly wider than 10 mm on DX. So this lens is extremely useful on film!

I got my F65 with an AF 28-80 f/3.5-5.6D lens. This is dinkiest all-plastic Nikon lens I've ever seen. The thing I like is that it's an AF lens with an aperture ring, so it's compatible with even older Nikon cameras. If you don't care about that, get it with the AF 28-80 f/3.5-5.6G. which is also all-plastic, but much more solid and a bit smaller and lighter. Note that the F65 can't use its light meter with non-CPU lenses from the manual focus era.

Verdict: if you have a Nikon DSLR and some lenses, even if they're DX lenses, and you have any interest in shooting film, get an F65. It's a great camera and it can be found for next to nothing. And now you have second body for those times where you can't change lenses easily, or you can hand the F65 to someone you don't trust with your expensive DSLR.

Permalink - posted 2014-06-19

Testing 50 mm lenses

▼ Since I got back in the SLR game, I got some additional second hand cameras and lenses. As a result, I'm now the owner of no fewer than five 50 mm lenses. (Well, four 50 mm and one 55 mm.) So I decided to compare them. First an overview, then some testing!

The one on the top left is the 55 mm one that came with my old Petri TTL camera. It's a manual-everything camera with only a light meter needle to show you if your shutter/aperture settings will produce a proper exposure. The last time I used it was the last days of 1999 and the first days of 2000, I think. It still kind of works, but not all that well, and the mercury cells that the light meter needs are no longer sold.

The lens on the top right came with a Praktica camera, probably a BC3. I think my mother borrowed it and dropped it in a pond or something. The Praktica BC3 was still manual focus, but it had an electronic shutter and an aperture priority mode so it can automatically set the shutter speed. The lens has three electrical contacts to talk to the camera. (I also still have a Praktica 70-210 mm zoom and an adapter for M42 lenses, let me know if you want to take any of this off my hands.)

The other three lenses are Nikons:

The one on the left on the second photo is the NIKKOR 50mm 1:2. It's the only one of the five that doesn't have an f/1.8 maximum aperture, but f/2. This is an AI (auto indexing) lens, a type that Nikon sold in the late 1970s and early 1980s. You can tell from the fact that the smallest aperture number (16) is not in orange, in this case it's in blue. This lens came with a Nikon FE that I bought the other day.

The lens in the middle is a Nikon LENS SERIES E 50mm 1:1.8, which came with another FE that I originally bought, but that one didn't work. The lens is fine, though. It's an AIS (improved auto indexing) lens with the orange minimum aperture. It was a low end lens, which probably explains why Nikon didn't bother to include the rabbit ears for compatibility with older cameras, and possibly why it's not deemed worthy of the Nikkor name. A few Nikons from the 1980s and/or 1990s can do shutter priority and program modes with AIS lenses, but both older and newer cameras don't care about the difference between AI and AIS. Unlike its siblings on both sides, the E doesn't have what looks like a built-in lens hood, so it's very small, especially when mounted on my Nikon D7100.

Last but not least, there's the AF NIKKOR 50mm 1:1.8D. This is a lens that I bought new for use with my D90 five years ago. It's the only one of the bunch that is an autofocus lens. Even though it's still sold new today it's an old design; current lenses usually lack an aperture ring. But this one still has both the old mechanical AIS couplings as well as the CPU contacts used by modern cameras, so it works with all Nikon F-mount cameras, although it won't autofocus on lower end digital SLRs.

The tests

With an M42 adapter, I can mount the Petri lens on my D7100, so I tested that one along with the Nikon lenses. I don't have an adapter for Praktica lenses so I couldn't test that one.

I tested at f/1.8 (or f/2) and f/8. I used a manual shutter speed, but I miscalculated the difference between f/1.8 and f/8 so the f/8 shots are darker. Sorry! As I was shooting, the lenses seemed identical. They all suffer from some axial chromatic aberration when focussing using live view with maximum magnification: when out of focus in one direction, the blurry edges are a bit red, in the other direction they're a bit green. The test shots at f/1.8 or f/2 are on the left, the ones at f/8 on the right:

Click the links to see the test shots with the Petri, the f/2 AI, the Series E, and the AF using manual focus, autofocus in live view and normal autofocus, respectively.

The first thing that's obvious is that at f/8, all the lenses are dramatically better. Remember, this is pretty much dead center of the frame, too. The difference will likely be even larger in the corners of the frame. This is a 100% crop, so don't think these lenses are no good wide open, without insane magnification the results still look quite good. Also, using regular AF didn't quite nail the focus. However, the subject was small white text on black in a rather dim room, so don't read too much into that. Interestingly, the Series E lens is the best of the bunch wide open, and perhaps also a hair bitter than the others at f/8. So I guess good things come in small packages.

Permalink - posted 2014-06-17