In a few days' time The White Stripes' "Fell in Love with a Girl" will be fifteen years old. It wasn't their first single, but it was the first I remember seeing on television. You remember the video. It was made with Lego pieces. Stop-motion Lego pieces. Little stop-motion Lego pieces, moving and stopping and moving and stopping. Lego pieces. Moving, constantly moving, and constantly stopping. A whirling zoetrope of plastic brought to life by invisible hands. Today we're going to have a look at the Nikon F-301, a 35mm SLR that was sold in the United States as the Nikon N2000, although nowadays everybody calls it the Nikon F-301, albeit that no-one calls it anything because no-one remembers it or cares about it. Constantly moving and stopping, moving and stopping.
1985. Nikon sold it alongside the F-501 / N2020, which was essentially the same camera but with an autofocus motor. Autofocus was a big thing back then, but there was still room in the market for manual focus cameras. In November 1985 Popular Photography had a look at the F-301 and concluded that it was okay, I guess, although the reviewer basically describes the camera without passing judgement.
Also, check out the font in that article. It's a good example of a proportional font, e.g. the letter I in NIKON is much narrower than the letter O - but also check out how the letter O actually pushes into the cleft of the K. It's ITC Avant Garde Gothic. Notice how the zeroes in the N2000's logo (on the camera) overlap. The official camera sponsor of the 1984 Olympics was Canon, so perhaps Nikon wanted to make people mentally associate Nikon with the Olympic games without saying so explicitly. I don't know.
Flight of ideas is a mental disorder characteristic of mania. Nikon sold the F-301 as an entry-level beginner's camera, although compared to the later F-50 and F-70 it feels a lot more substantial. A few years later it would have been mid-range. The top plate is apparently made of plastic but the chassis is metal, and overall the F-301 is heavier and more solid than I expected. Benoît Pioulard's music is fantastic. He's an ambient-indie musician (technically Benoît Pioulard is a "project"; his real name is Thomas). His ambient music mostly sticks to the same formula of evolving, distorted drones, and it sounds lovely:
"Sonic sculpture" is a cliche, but in this case it's true, Pioulard's songs are like blocks of sound built to be contemplated, or moods that slowly pass through you. Until recently I assumed that ambient music was the entirety of his bag, but he has also made jangly indie pop and even ambient folk. Last year he broke his wrist! Unfortunately this incurred hefty medical costs. If only he had flown across the Atlantic to the UK, where he could have had the surgery for free, except that they won't let you fly if you have a broken wrist, but perhaps he could have hidden it in a big glove. I don't know.
Nowadays the F-301's design smells of the 1980s. In those days it was fashionable to ask Porsche Design or Giorgetto Giugiaro to have a go at designing camera bodies; the F-301 looks like something by Porsche or Giugiaro but apparently it was designed in-house.
F-301s are available on eBay for pennies. They have no real antique value. As with the early Canon EOS cameras the body is slightly more upmarket than it appears. I bought one so I could try out my 28mm f/2.8 AI-S on a period-correct AI-S-enabled Nikon film camera, because why not?
AI-S was Nikon's early-80s attempt to bring program automatic exposure to their film cameras, but instead of using electronic circuits the system used a mechanical coupling. I wrote about it in this post, when I covered the Nikon 28mm f/2.8 AI-S. It was very limited, and only a handful of cameras used it, but the lenses are highly prized today because they were optically very good and built to a higher standard than the early Nikon AF range.
With an AI 20mm f/3.5
Spec-wise the F-301 resembles the Pentax A3, Canon T70 and so forth. It uses Nikon's AI lens mount and is one of only four Nikon SLRs that supported AI-S; it's manual focus only; it has DX film coding and electronic film advance, but manual rewind; it has a non-standard "PPhiAM" exposure matrix, oddly without S; it takes four AAA batteries, or four AA batteries with an optional baseplate.
I have this baseplate, and with four Eneloops the F-301 lasts forever. Which is good, because it's dead weight without batteries. It doesn't have a backup mechanical shutter speed, but even if it did there would be no way to wind the film on. Unlike some motor-equipped cameras it shoots until it detects film tension rather than stopping at exactly 36 frames, so a few of my rolls had 37 exposures. When you insert film it winds on with three quick shots.
The F-301 has a beeper that beeps if the shutter speed is too slow. You can turn it off. The beeper and the motor drive are very loud.
The camera was sold as an entry-level model, but it still has some of Nikon's professional heritage. You need to press a small button before you can twist the exposure dial; ditto rewind. The motor drive runs at an unusually fast 3.5fps.
Beyond the AA baseplate there were no special accessories. No handgrip, no dedicated speedlight (the F-501 had the SB-20), no underwater case etc.
The full caption is "black dudes, you can avoid the rain drops if you smoke".
So the story goes, during the making of The Fifth Element director Luc Besson came up with an imaginary alien language for Milla Jovovich's character, and by the end of filming the pair of them were so proficient in this language that they could have entire conversations. Humanity developed language for sound practical reasons, but to what extent does language shape our consciousness? I have no idea, but the F-301 is something of a bargain on the used market. Historically it was quickly overshadowed by Nikon's new autofocus cameras. In the 1990s and 2000s it was never prized by the cult camera crowd, who instead gravitated towards Nikon's older manual focus SLRs such as the EM and F3 and so forth.
On a technological level the F-301 is objectively more advanced than the F3, but the F3 has a much better viewfinder. The viewfinder is the F-301's biggest weakness. It feels cramped and I have to jam the camera against my face to see all of it. It's a shame because the other reason I bought an F-301 is because it's one of the newest Nikon cameras with a split-image viewfinder.
It uses centre-weighted metering, with a large circle in the viewfinder illustrating the metering bias. I have to admit that I've only shot negative film with it, so I can't comment on the accuracy of the metering system; it didn't stand out in any way, which I suppose is a good thing.
My F-301 was actually broken when it arrived - the mirror and shutter were jammed - but after a bit of poking it started working again, so top marks to Nikon's early-1980s engineers. It continued to work and as of 2019, when I went through this post to take out some of the bad words, it continues to work. I know this because I've just tried it. In the 1990s Nikon embraced cheapness to an alarming extent but the F-301 was perhaps the last gasp of old-school we-need-to-make-a-cheap-camera-but-we-have-standards Nikon.
If you want to experiment with film photography and old Nikon manual focus lenses the F-301 is an interesting value proposition. It can't depreciate any more, the only issue is liquidity, but you have to ask yourself if you'd rather fulfil a childhood dream and buy an F4 instead. But then again the F-301 has a split-image viewfinder as standard whereas with the F4 split-image was an option. The F-501, FA, and EM are logical alternatives, the EM in particular because it's small and cute, and that's about that for the F-301.
