Nikon F70 (N70)

Nikon gave the F70 a control system that photographers have argued about for thirty years. Instead of dedicated dials, you hold a function button and rotate a thumb wheel through a fan-shaped LCD, clicking past icons for drive mode, metering pattern, exposure compensation, and the rest. Some people learned the dance and stopped noticing it. Others sold the body inside a month and never looked back. Almost nobody is neutral about it, and it is usually the first thing they bring up.

Look past the interface and the camera is quietly excellent. This was Nikon's enthusiast autofocus body from the mid-90s, slotted under the pro F-series and above the consumer N50, riding the F mount that Nikon has kept in continuous use since 1959 and that takes the long line of AI and autofocus Nikkors. The viewfinder is bright with a decent eye-level pentaprism, the autofocus is single-point and reasonably quick for the era, and the shutter runs from 30 seconds up to about 1/4000 with flash sync near 1/120, which is genuinely fast for a focal-plane curtain. Film handling is fully motorized: drop the cartridge in, close the back, and the body loads, advances, and rewinds on its own. Two CR123 cells power all of it.

The meter is the reason to keep one. It uses Nikon's matrix metering, the segmented pattern that reads the whole frame and guesses at the scene, and in plain daylight it returns the right exposure frame after frame without fuss. There is center-weighted and spot in there too, buried under the function dial. Most people leave it in matrix and program auto and treat the F70 as a very smart point-and-shoot that happens to take real glass.

Matrix metering is clever until the scene fights it. Point this body into a window, shoot a backlit portrait, or work a snowfield and the averaging logic pulls the important tones toward gray. That is the moment to stop trusting the body and start making the call yourself. Take a spot or incident reading off the Zone Light Meter app, decide which zone the shadows belong on, and dial that exposure in by hand. The camera reads the scene well, but it does not know what you actually care about in the frame.

The honest weakness is the electronics, and it is the same one that haunts every plastic-era Nikon. There is no mechanical fallback. When the main board or the LCD finally goes, and on some bodies it does, the camera becomes a paperweight, because nobody is reasonably repairing a mid-tier 1990s SLR. The grip rubber gets sticky, the back-panel display can fade, and a CLA costs more than the body is worth.

Which is exactly why it is one of the best cheap entries into the F system today. The F70 trades against the N90s and the F801, and it usually loses on collector cachet and wins on price. Buy it for the matrix meter and the autofocus, mount a fast fifty, ignore the people complaining about the function dial, and shoot a few hundred frames before the battery door even thinks about getting loose.