"New" camera purchased on eBay, pro-level stuff!

[wfooshee]

So a few weeks ago I was browsing around on eBay (looking for lenses, actually) and came across what looked like a giveaway price on a camera body. I did a search specifically for that model, and lo and behold, they were all over the place.

So I put some on my watch list, and they'd creep up past what I wanted to spend, but I kept looking, kept watching, and last week, I nailed a Nikon F4 for $155!

Has the standard DP-20 finder and MB-21 battery pack. (There is an MB-20 battery pack, 4 AA cells instead of 6, giving a lower maximum frame rate. The MB-21 pack makes it an F4s, and the smaller MB-20 makes it a "plain" F4.) The finder is removable so you can change focusing screens. If I want to use a manual-focus lens, I can mount a screen that has the rangefinder and microprism in the center. Auto-focus, mount a screen that simply has the metering zone circles and the focus sensor mark.

I know, I know... "Holy hell, Walter, what's wrong with you??? FILM??!!!??!?!?!"


But dayum!! Shutter speed as fast as 1/8000th; flash sync at 1/250th; matrix-metered fill flash; auto-focus; matrix, center-weighted, and spot metering; Manual, aperture-priority, shutter-priority, and two programmed modes; up to nearly 6 frames per second; mounts any Nikon lens since 1959, meters any AI or later lens, and will do stopped-down metering on pre-AI lenses (Not that these older lenses are really a concern of mine personally, but you never know what you might find out there); works correctly with my SB-600 flash (including zooming the flash head to match the lens); autofocuses with my AF-S lenses; and puts no drain on the batteries when you put it down.

When Nikon introduced AF cameras, they went a different direction than Canon and Minolta. Instead of changing the lens mount completely to accomodate the new AF lenses, they simply added some stuff to the existing mount. They also put the focus motor in the camera body instead of the lens, so their AF lenses might be a little cheaper than others' equivalents. Old lenses would mount to the new AF cameras, so unlike the Canon and Minolta shooters, you didn't have to buy new glass to try the new camera, unless you wanted autofocus.

But Nikon eventually added motorized lenses, which they call AF-S, and some of their cheaper DSLRs have dropped the in-body focus motor, so those HAVE to have AF-S lenses. D40, D3000, D5000, etc.

Thing is, AF-S lenses didn't exist when this camera was introduced, but it works with them!

The only thing it won't activate on my current lenses is VR, Nikon's optical stabilization.

So an indestructible professional camera that was over $2000 in 1988, for $155 in today's money. Deal!

Downsides:
Uses this weird chemical media to store images, so you can't see your pictures until they've been "processed." This media doesn't seem expensive at first glance, but when a discount store charges 8 or 9 bucks for blank media, then about 10 bucks for processing (some kind of scam there, I'm sure!) then you see it will cost nearly 20 bucks for 24 pictures!!!!

Wait!!! Nearly 85 cents per frame????!?!?!?!?!?! That 6 frames per second is not so enticing any more!

OK, that's a negative. (Haha. Negative!)

It's big, and made of metal. It's nearly three pounds without lens!!! I'm-a gonna need a better strap than what's on this thing, for sure. It makes my D5000 look like a compact point-and-shoot!

I carried it around yesterday and shot a couple of rolls of (cheap) print film, just to see how it feels. The pics came back, and for the most part, this thing works great! There were a couple of very underexposed prints, but I don't know how much of that is the processor.... The negatives for those frames aren't lighter than the surrounding frames..... I'm in between scanners right now so I can't post any of these. (My previous computer died, and my new one has no PCI slots for the SCSI card my film scanner is connected to.)

I took some long shots with my 70-300, took some insect/flower shots, took some "wide" shots at 70. I don't have any other full-frame lenses, so the 70-300 is it for this camera for now.

So after carrying it around, some upsides:

It's accurate. All but a couple of the prints are exactly what I was looking at.

The viewfinder is big and bright. Mine has the 'E' focusing screen in it, which has vertical and horizontal grid lines etched in it, good for checking that the horizon is level. Shutter and aperture, frame count, focus, exposure, and flash-ready are all visible, and the electronic displays are illuminated passively by light through a frosted window on top of the pentaprism. A switch can illuminate the displays at night.

There are no menus, no screens to sift through. Not even an information LCD. Every function has a dedicated button, switch, or dial. Film speed is a dial. Shutter speed is a dial. Shooting mode is a dial. AF lock is a button. (The AF lock button also locks exposure, unless you move the switch to lock focus only. There is a separate AE lock button, which is AE only at all times. The buttons are next to each other, right by the grip, and one is concave and the other convex so you can distinuguish them without looking!) DOF preview is a button. AF mode (manual, single, continuous) is a switch. Drive mode (Single, continuous high, continuous low, etc.) is a switch. Metering mode is a switch. Exposure compensation is a dial. Sounds primitive, but boy, does it make this thing fast to use!!!!

The grip is shaped so you can hold the camera vertically with your hand "under" the camera, and there's another shutter button there to use from that position.

The thing places no drain on the batteries if the shutter button is not depressed. The "power" switch turns nothing on, it merely enables the shutter button. The off position is not called Off, it's called Lock. So no forgetting to turn it off and finding a dead camera the next day.

It even works with G-series lenses, which have no aperture ring. I can't shoot aperture-priority or manual with those, of course. Actually, I'm not sure it won't. Maybe it works while limiting me to "wide-open" as the aperture setting. I didn't shoot like that, but while fiddling around, the viewfinder reported the aperture as the lens's maximum, and flashed no red-x "you-can't-do-that" symbol.

So even if I decide not to shoot a lot of film, I'm probably going to hang on to this beast. If I decide I don't really want to keep it - well, eBay is out there, and maybe I can even make a buck unloading it!

 

[Carlos]

Please put a cap on your D5000 You never know...

But thanks for the story! If I remember correctly my dad used this same body 'back in the days'.. He produced the photos himself, maybe you can try it out.. (IF you have the room for it..) (.... not that you need that much)

Must look strange to have a 'new' lens on such an old body. I have to try this out too, sounds like fun I have some old bodys laying around but they are just for the haves (they don't work).. Searching up the F4 here on the local ebay, €175.. Maybe it's cheaper to do it the way you did..

Post some photos up when you have the time! 👍

 

[wfooshee]

Regarding the cap on the D5000: it lives in the bag with the 18-55 attached. I have no clue where its body cap even is any more. But onward:

Another day carrying the F4 around. This time I carried both cameras, the F4 with the 70-300 and the D5000 with the kit 55-200. Theoretically that was to make the comparisons between cameras, since with the crop factor they come out to the same image view on each camera. The difference between the lenses spoiled that theory, and I've been reminded why the 55-200 has been sitting in a box all these months after I bought the 70-300!!!! Maybe the newer one, with VR, is better. I don't see how it could be any worse, anyway!

I'm still "in between" scanners, so when I took the film in, I asked for the CD instead of prints, so I could at least get images onto the computer. CD only is not any cheaper, by the way.

Well, the CD lets me see the pictures on the PC screen, but that's about it. They were scanned at 1.5 megapixels!!!!! What the hell good does that do????? The drugstore moron's machine numbered the images backwards, too! Frame 1 on the negative is image file 24 on the CD. Really?????

I have a film scanner, but when my PC died and was replaced, I ended up with no place to install the interface card; no PCI slots in the new PC, only PCI-e. I've ordered a card, and I have to get new software, too, because Nikon's film scanner software does not run on Windows 7, especially not Win7x64. Can hardly wait to get that back up and running!!!! Then the drugstore will be develop only, gimme the negatives!!!!

Anyway, my conclusions:

1. Using drugstore processing to get your pictures makes eating dirty diapers coated with cat puke sound enticing.
2. Nikon's 55-200 kit lens is much like a dirty diaper coated with cat puke.
3. Nikon's 70-300 VR is an incredible value.
4. The F4's large viewscreen RAWKS!!!!11!1!!!ZOMG!!!!!111!!!
5. The D5000's screen is actually brighter, but being smaller is much harder to do things with, like manually focus.
6. In 20 years they've learned a thing or two about auto-focus.
7. The F4 should be mounted on a granite pedestal to support its weight, and whatever you want a picture of should be brought to it.

The auto-focus issue first: When I was out Sunday, I shot stationary items for the most part. Trees. Buildings. Parked cars. If I shot something that was alive, it was standing still at the time.

Today I made the attempt to shoot flying birds. Unlike Sunday, we had flying birds today. The F4 moved the focus the wrong direction nearly every time!!!! It usually went to infinity, to minimum, and back to infinity and gave up, even as it passed my subject.

Knowing that the early sensors worked by contrast, I experimented. Turns out it needs a lot of contrast! It had trouble focusing on the ground in front of me unless there was something sharply shadowed or very differently colored. Smooth pavement, it would hunt.

So: white birds against cloudy sky: not useful.

Tested same with the D5000, almost no problem, as long as I could keep the bird in the sensor box (not alway easy, what with how they flit and dive and stuff.)

That was quite disappointing, actually, because after Sunday's shooting I was surprised and well impressed with how well the F4's AF performed, recalling issued I'd had with my n8008 back in the day. Well, those issues resurfaced today, and this was pretty much exactly how I remembered the n8008.

I ran onto another film vs. digital issue today, which didn't crop up Sunday. Frame 1 of one roll was fogged, and frames 2 and 4 (?) of the other were fogged. I can't recall ever seeing that on my D5000 or on my previous D50.

So some pictures: Here's a pair that matched pretty closely! The D5000 image had some contrast added before I saved it, the F4 frame is as found on the CD.

D5000, 200mm:

F4, 300mm:

Here's a cardinal spotted in a pine tree. First the D5000 frame, then cropped on the bird. Now, in the full frame you can see that the bird is exactly in the center of the frame, i.e. the focus sensor, yet the crop makes it clear that the lens focused well behind the bird. After those is a similar image from the F4. I can't show a crop because my original image has just over 10% as many pixels as the D5000 image, thanks to the drugstore moron (or his machine.)

Here's one on the ground, a lizard trying to escape. These are at 1/250th so I don't think it's shake that makes the 55-200 so bad... First is the D5000, 55-200, full and cropped, then the F4 70-300 similarly placed.

Lastly, I just want to show that it's not the F4 being better than the D5000, but it's the 70-300 being much better than the 55-200, by orders of magnitude more than I expected. Here are 3 shots, all on the F4. The 55-200 at 55mm, then at 200mm, then the 70-300 at 300mm. I was actually surprised to get so little vignetting on the 55-200 at its short end, but that was the only pleasant thing it had for me all day.

55-200 at 55mm:

55-200 @200mm:

70-300 @ 300mm:

(BTW, I didn't shoot it, but the 18-55 kit lens, which is much better than the 55-200 somehow, doesn't just vignette at the short end, it has deep black corners! It's actually fine past 24mm length.)

So my planned camera comparison today turned into a lens comparison. I have to say that I found myself looking for things in the wrong place on the D5000 way more often than I did on the F4 as I switched back and forth! Several times I turned the mode dial when I intended to change shutter speed. Actually, the only time I reached for the wrong control on the F4 was when I went for the shutter speed dial without looking, and tried to turn exposure compensation instead, which is locked unless you press a button beside it. I should have been able to tell by its size that it was the wrong dial, but still, only that one wrong selection on an unfamiliar camera says something about the F4's ergonomics!!!

 

[wfooshee]

OK, I got my film scanner hooked up to my new computer. Then I was reminded that my film scanner needs refurbishment.

After seeing what it does, I remember what I'd forgotten, that it has shifted to a much cooler default color, i.e. very blue-ish results, and has gotten quite noisy, much like using a digital camera at maximum ISO. Also, once in a while it scans a darker or even black line across a section of the image.

So my film "revolution" must wait. For now it's back to digital, no chemistry involved. Off goes the scanner for a refit.

 

[wfooshee]

My film scanner's back!!!! My film scanner's back!!!!!!

Now I got stuff to do.

The first negative I scanned was to see what the %@#* the drugstore was thinking on one of the prints I got. Here's a flatbed scan of the print they delivered:

Here's my scan of the negative:

OK, it's still no Pulitzer-prize image, but how could the drugstore moron be that far off??!?!?!

So this is my lesson: if you wanna play with film, don't let anybody else play with your film!!!! Get a film scanner and ask them to "develop only."

 

[F1GTR]

Time for you to start building up a home processing kit for B&W! I looked at F4s when I wanted to buy a Nikon film body, I ended up with an F3HP since I found the motor drive a bit too noisy. Still lusting after an F5 though!

 

[wfooshee]

OK, I have made a Finding.

If you're going to do stuff with chemicals, lenses, and paper, then film is the way to go. You want to do your own prints and enlargements, negatives are useful.

If you want to work with your images digitally, then film is just plain stupid. Shoot digitally. It's way easier to copy files from a memory card than it is to scan the negatives.

That said, since my film scanner is finally back from refurbishment, I've had some fun (Liar!) getting my images into the computer.

My trip into film was a bit of a nostalgia kick. I saw how cheaply one could obtain what was once the Holy Grail of 35mm SLRs, a Nikon F4, for less than 300 bucks, maybe even less tha 200!!!! I have enjoyed playing with the camera, even if I haven't so much enjoyed using the images out of it. That thing is a nice piece of kit!!!

But with what film and processing costs, even with "develop only" and no prints or CDs, you could pay for a D7000 in a few weeks of shooting. And that doesn't even begin to include the time it takes to scan, since nobody is going to print your pictures the way you want them.

I really was hoping, though, that film could give me a "texture" or something that was missing from digital. You know, the way audiophiles still insist that their scratchy vinyl records sound better than digitized music.

That said, here are some of the images I got. Some of them are noticably out of kilter color-wise; I simply got tired of fighting Image, Adjust, Balance and Image, Adjust, Level, and left the image where it was at that point.

These were all shot the first week of July either at the beach here, or at the state park on the east end of the beach.

Finally, for comparison, just a few similar frames from the same trips, shot digitally:

 

[35mm]

I don't know how I missed this thread before.

You made a fantastic deal. Also, the comparisons were very interesting.

Nice write-up. Keep them coming.

 

[Takumi Fujiwara]

The drugstore probably has a machine, where they load the roll into it, and it does everything from processing the negatives, to scanning them, to making prints, so the guy who works there probably has nothing to do with the process at all.

I used to shoot a ton of film, but if you want good quality, you have to shoot chrome (slide) film, and you have to get it developed professionally. Unfortunately that's not so easy anymore. If you can, shoot some Fuji Velvia 50 (Not 100, which is a very different film), it's amazing stuff and makes anything other than portraits look awesome.

The big problem with that F4 is that you're totally gonna get spoiled by it. I had a D50 and an F100 at the same time for a while, and the difference in handling drove me nuts. Pro bodies are just so amazing to work with that it's hard to go back.

 

[35mm]

I used to shoot a ton of film, but if you want good quality, you have to shoot chrome (slide) film, and you have to get it developed professionally.

True. But the problem (for me, at least) is not finding someone to develop it, but the price. I pay around 6€ for developing and scanning normal film, whereas, in the same place, they'll ask me almost 30€ for doing the same thing. 👎

The big problem with that F4 is that you're totally gonna get spoiled by it. I had a D50 and an F100 at the same time for a while, and the difference in handling drove me nuts. Pro bodies are just so amazing to work with that it's hard to go back.

True as well. No buts.

 

[Takumi Fujiwara]

Wow, 30 euro? That's crazy!

One other thing I should've mentioned - there's always the option of shooting B&W and developing the film at home. If you don't make prints, and just scan the negatives, you really don't need much equipment, it's not that hard to do, and it's much more cost-effective. I've been meaning to do that, but my only film camera worth using broke, so I need to fix it first. (Mamiya C33, medium format TLR)

 

[wfooshee]

Haven't shot any slide film, yet, but that's next. I used to shoot slides exclusively, both because they were cheaper, and because the slide was what I shot, exposure-wise, and not "fixed" by the processer.
So if I find some, stay tuned.
Regarding handling of the camera, having such versatility (auto-exposure modes, metering modes, focus modes, drive speeds, lock buttons, etc.) would imply a level of confusion, but nothing could be further from the truth. As I said in a previous post, my ONLY handling mistake was trying to turn the exposure mode dial one time instead of the shutter speed dial while staying in the viewfinder. Impressive for an unfamiliar camera!