AF NIKKOR Film supremo

Interest in film photography is growing, and the Nikon F100 could be just the camera to help you explore it. John Gilbey explains why

- John Gilbey

At a glance

£200-300 body only, used

• High-quality 35mm film SLR

• Uses Nikon F-mount autofocus lenses

• Similar form factor to Nikon DSLRs

• 3D Matrix metering

• Robust alloy chassis

• Excellent viewfinder

If you became interested in photography at any point in the past 20 years, the chances are that your initial experience was a digital one. The rate of camera development in that period has been truly impressive, and the digital path to imaging is well established as the mainstream technology.

Increasingly, however, folk are looking again at analogue techniques – silver-based imaging – as a true alternative to stand alongside digital photography. It’s a route which allows the photographer a lot of individual creativity, as well as being a huge amount of fun, but inevitably you’ll need to buy additional kit in order to explore it. If you are an existing Nikon DSLR user, a very good candidate is the Nikon F100 film SLR, as it can use many of the Nikkor F-mount lenses that you already have in your bag.

The Nikon F100 is a finalgeneration film camera. Produced between 1999 and 2006, it shared space in the Nikon range with the decidedly retro-styled FM3A film camera (2001-2006) and the first professional digital models such as the innovative D1 (1999-2001). As a result of its development in this period of crossover for the industry, the F100 benefited from both the last refinements of the film era and some of the new thinking that digital brought about. This results in a camera whose operation and layout will be immediately familiar to DSLR users.

Layout and handling