I should have written this review two years ago. In fact, I sat down, worked on it, wrote it, revised it, threw it out, and started over a dozen times or more since then. The Nikon F4 is one of those cameras that’s had as much written about it as needs to be said; however, here are some key takeaways for you: The F4 is reliable, robust, capable, and in the views of most reviewers the perfect pairing of old- and new- Nikon, a middle-ground hybrid as at home with a 1960s lens as a 2020s lens. The F lineage before it could not say that, nor could the F lineage after, at least not out of the box. The F4 was the last Nikon F camera that could natively accept the old NAI lenses as well as the modern AI-G lenses.
The F4 retained the older dial-based control system later scrapped in the F5 in favor of menus and buttons. The F4 also had the best light meter of the F lineage, especially as that applies to manual-focus lenses. And for those reasons and others, the F4 today is often the favorite F body of Nikon film photographers, even more so than the F5 and F6. That, I think, is a perfectly understandable, well-reasoned, and generally appropriate stance. In fact, the only significant detraction most people make of the F4 is that, when loaded down with AA batteries, it is a heavy, heavy camera.
I had the good fortune to shoot three Nikon F4 cameras to take the photos in this video. The one that did the most work was also the one in the worst condition. A retired U.S. Navy camera, it had seen abuse, made manifest in a missing strap lug, a frame counter that stopped at 20, and a cracked diffuser cover in the meter illumination pane. Many other small chips, scratches, and dings hinted at a lengthy career of being ridden hard, put away wet, and generally being abused for service. And it still worked, meter properly, functioned as designed, and has relatively few issues. This, I think, is as high a praise as can be levied for a camera: despite exceptionally rough treatment, it kept working.
When I began shooting the Nikon F4, back around 2015, I didn’t really understand why people liked it so much. However, with years of use and experience, I do understand. The camera gives the photographer a logical and easily-accessed layout with features and functions that can be reached and adjusted without ever looking away from the viewfinder. The Nikon F4 feels, much more so than most every camera made after it, like it was designed by photographers dedicated to making a camera for photographers. And to that end, if the F4 is your favorite camera, or even just your favorite Nikon camera, good choice.
But the F4 is not perfect. The weight is significant, but we can look past that. The use of AA batteries, though great and something that makes this camera highly usable, pre-dated rechargeables and led to a lot of battery waste. Also, on the subject of batteries, the propensity of AA alkaline batteries to leak with time led to all three of the F4 bodies I owned having some amount of alkaline battery leakage and, in one case, some electronic quirks due to alkaline corrosion following the electric wiring into the camera’s circuitry. That the camera in question still worked generally well, however, attests to its otherwise stunning build quality.
Ultimately, is the F4 a camera I will miss using? No, not really. I sold my last one a few months ago, the one that took most of the photos in this video, and never looked back. The F4’s technical wizardry allows it to do some fantastic and amazing things with the Nikon system’s components, and that also represents something about cameras in general. The F4 highlights this in stark relief: Cameras in the 1950s and 1960s could do about 98% of what any photographer could need. By the 1970s, a solid case exists that more than 99% of photographic needs were addressed by most cameras. The refinements, complexity, added features, and tools added to cameras in the decades that followed, and this continues to be true today, simply met the needs of an increasingly small number of users while providing savvy marketing teams with things they could use to help sell more cameras with more features to people who would never use them. The F4 is very much one of those cameras. It is decidedly capable, decidedly well made, over-built, exceptionally designed and conceived, and for most of us, if we owned one and used it exclusively for our entire lives, then still 90% of what it can do, it never would do.
"Memories of Sarah" and "Northern" by Daniel Kaede, "Rain Quail" by Dust Follows, & "We're Gonna be Okay" by Cody Francis used under active license from Epidemic Sound at the time of this video's upload.
