The Nikon F-301
$5 in any good thrift store………
The Nikon F-301 arrives in 1985 wearing the expression of a man who has just discovered polycarbonate and cannot understand why everyone is making such a fuss about brass. Here, at last, is a Nikon that has read a self-help book. Gone is the dour mechanical Calvinism of its forebears; in its place a built-in motor drive that whirrs with the smug efficiency of a junior management consultant advancing through a slideshow he himself has written. It will fire at 2.5 frames per second whether you want it to or not, because it believes in momentum. It believes in you. Load four AAA batteries, and it springs to life with the eager, faintly desperate energy of Baxter hearing the words “In-N-Out Burger.”
And lo, there is Program mode. The F-301 would like you to know that it has thoughts about exposure, and that those thoughts are better than yours. Select P, and it takes the decisions out of your trembling artisanal hands, choosing aperture and shutter speed with the breezy confidence of someone who has never been wrong and never will be. There are beeps. There is a little LED display that flashes encouragement, like a fitness app from the future. You may, if you are feeling rebellious, switch to aperture priority or full manual, at which point the camera regards you with the wounded patience of a parent watching a teenager attempt to assemble flat-pack furniture. It will let you fail. It has the screen-printed serenity of a machine that knows you’ll be back.
Is it any good? Yes, infuriatingly. The viewfinder is bright, the metering is honest, and it will mount nearly any Nikkor you can wave at it, which means decades of glorious glass at the front and a plastic shrug at the back. It is the unloved middle child of the Nikon dynasty: not romantic enough for the collectors, not professional enough for the pros, too capable to throw away. It does everything competently and nothing memorably, which is precisely why it survives in shoeboxes across the land, still working, still beeping, still quietly judging your composition.
Bolt on the 20mm f/3.5 AIS and the whole enterprise acquires delusions of grandeur. This is a lens that wants you to believe the world is more interesting than it is — lean in close and everything looms, the foreground swelling with self-importance while the background flees toward a vanishing point somewhere near despair. It is not so small, jewel-like, and faintly dishonest, the optical equivalent of a wide-angle anecdote at a dinner party: stretch the edges far enough and even a parked car becomes an Event. Stop it down to f/8 and it sharpens into something genuinely magnificent, which only proves the F-301’s central thesis — that with enough confidence and the right attachment, mediocrity can be made to look like vision………..
4 Stars…….
