Nikon F60 (N60)

The shutter has a chirp to it, a quick electronic snap-and-whir, because nothing on the F60 happens without the battery doing it for you. Drop in two CR2 lithium cells and the camera wakes up. Pull them out and you are holding a paperweight. This was Nikon's late-1990s answer to the question of how cheap an autofocus SLR could get while still wearing the F badge, and the answer was: pretty cheap, but not insultingly so.

Look through the finder and it is fine. Not bright, not dim, just a workmanlike pentamirror view with a focus-confirm indicator and a simple set of LCD readouts under the frame. The autofocus uses a single center point, slow by any modern standard, and it hunts in low light. Loading film is the easy part of any camera from this era, drop the cartridge in, pull the leader to the mark, close the back, and the motor threads it for you. The shutter runs from long exposures down to about 1/2000, with flash sync at 1/120, which is genuinely useful for daylight fill if you bother to learn the modes.

That meter is a 3D matrix system when you mount a D-type lens, and it is the camera's best trick. For everyday color negative work it nails exposure more often than it has any right to at this price. Where it falls down is the same place every matrix meter falls down: hard backlight, a face against a bright window, a snowfield. The camera averages toward gray and buries your subject. This is exactly the scene where you stop trusting the body, pull an incident or spot reading off the Zone Light Meter app, and place the shadows where you actually want them instead of where the matrix guesses.

The build is honest about what it is. Polycarbonate over a metal lens mount, light enough to forget in a bag, creaky if you squeeze it. It will drive AF-D glass and meter happily with the cheap, sharp 50mm primes everyone already owns. The command dial sits up front, the mode wheel on top, and the whole layout assumes you came up on point-and-shoots and are graduating slowly.

Who shoots it now? People who want a Nikon F-mount body for almost nothing, students handed one by a relative, anyone who already owns a 50mm f/1.8 D and wants a cheap film back to put behind it. It is the body you buy when an F100 is out of budget and an FM2 feels like too much manual work. The honest weakness is total battery dependence paired with dated, sluggish autofocus; this is not a camera for fast action or for a remote shoot where the cells die. But for a Sunday roll of Portra through a sharp prime, it does the job and gets out of the way, which at thirty dollars is more than fair.