Classic Camera Revival

While we have given cameras like the F, F2, and F3 their own separate episodes, the final three "Big F's" in Nikon's lineup were more evolutions of each other and were a radical departure from the previous manual cameras of the group. So on today's episode, we dig into the F4, F5, and the F6 to wrap this series up (finally). Like the original F, the F4 did not come out of a vacuum but rather from a combination of other cameras that acted as proof of concepts. The first is the Nikon FG which gave Nikon their first complete AE SLR, then the Nikon FA, which offered Matrix metering, and finally, the F-501, which introduced the original form of autofocus. These all culminated in 1988's Nikon F4. Again turning to the design first of Giroetto Giugiaro, the new design was big, bulky, and retained much of the manual control surfaces that many photographers were used to during this period. The camera won a design award that year, and despite being polarising, it proved that professional cameras could have full AE, inte