The Nikon F4


On its launch, the F4 was heralded as the professional autofocus camera which was clearly meant to put the Canon Eos range, and particularly the Eos 1, in its place. As a strategy it might have had some merit if the F4 had itself possessed the merit of being a good autofocus camera. It didn't.

The Nikon strategy of full lens compatibility across all generations of cameras had served the company well for nearly thirty years but, when it came to autofocus, Nikon had a painful lesson to learn.

Canon had recognised that, for autofocus to work well, the focussing motor had to be in the lens. If this meant designing a new mount, then so be it. Nikon, on the other hand, insisted on keeping their existing mount and that directed them down the path of putting the motor in the camera body. The result was a lacklustre AF performance that probably did more for Canon's sales than Nikon would ever care to admit.

The Best Manual Focus Nikon

Yet, autofocus apart, the F4 was a superb piece of machinery. Indeed, one could safely say that the F4 was the best manual focus camera the company had produced up to that point. From the bright, contrasty viewfinder with its exceptionally high viewpoint to the six frames per second, built in motorwind, the F4 was a true professional camera. Moreover, it was built to the same high standards as its predecessors and was every bit as reliable.

The completely re-designed, vertical travelling shutter offered manual speeds from 4 seconds to a blinding 1/8000 of a second and could X-sync at 1/250 second, which made it a pretty good studio camera if your tastes ran that way (as many people's did, in the event).  Used in automatic mode, the shutter would happily stay open for 30 seconds, which was adequate for capturing most black cats in coal cellars.

Nikon recognised in the F4 the importance of continuity and providing a familiar user interface to the photographer.

Thus, unlike the Eos, the F4 had a 'conventional' shutter setting dial in the same place it had always been and which felt like a setting dial ought to in use.

Additional dials were fitted to control the metering,  motor wind and shutter release options but these were fitted in the logical positions so that, within a few minutes of encountering the F4 for the first time, the user would be able to operate it with confidence.

Confidence Inspiring

And one thing the F4 certainly did was inspire confidence. It was a huge camera, and as solid as a block of lead. The Main chassis was machined out of two chunks of Aluminium Alloy and then stuffed full of precission engineering and electronics. A photographer is reputed to have said, on first encountering the original Nikon Ftn, that it was too great a burden for one man to bear alone. What he would have made of the F4 at twice the weight and size is anyone's guess!

There were three models of the F4, although they were actually the same camera with different battery holders. The F4 was properly the name given to the camera fitted with the MB-20 battery pack, taking four AA size cells. The F4S was the name given to the same machine fitted with the MB-21, taking six AA cells. Fit the MB-23 (which in turn held a MN-20 NiCad pack) and you had a F4E. On the whole, the F4E was the most popular configuration in America while European photographers were more commonly seen toting the F4S, such as the example illustrated here.

For a camera dependent on battery power, the F4 was encouragingly frugal in its demands with a F4S being capable of exposing several dozen films with the energy from a single set of batteries. Even the MB-20 equipped F4 was capable of running through thirty or more films on a single set of cells.

The F4 retained Nikon's trademark interchangeable prism and 100% viewfinder image. For the F4, the company produced a new range of finder options which mirrored the earlier versions but were improved in several ways. Not that many photographers found they needed much more than the standard DP-20 prism. The focusing screen was so deeply embedded in the body that for many photographers, a waist level finder was an unnecessary luxury. They simply took off the prism head and focused!

Making Light Work.

The F4 had a pretty sophisticated on-board computer system with three microprocessors and a full supporting cast of other ICs. The system was so sophisticated that it was connected together by a proprietary data bus and Nikon designers decided to make the most of the resources such a powerful data processing facility offered. One of the most obvious results was a new Matrix Metering system which was pretty well the most sophisticated exposure system introduced up to that point. It split the image area into five sections and used some clever algorithms to guess what the photographer thought was the most important part of the scene. In use, it was surprisingly effective.

In the flash department, the F4 excelled. It introduced a whole raft of flash modes and linked to Nikon's own flash guns via a sophisticated interface that made them all pretty well child's play. The most important of the new modes was the Matrix balanced fill-in flash system which made use of the Matrix Metering to get the fill in right. For photographers who used a lot of fill flash this proved to be invaluable.

Sound Advice

The one place where the F4 did not excel was in the noise department. Take a picture and not only did everyone in the room know you had done so, it was entirely possible that people in the next county had heard you too! Nikon did attempt to overcome this with a silent mode but this was less than successful in many cameras and prone to become less effective with use, for some reason.

The F4 was, it has to be said, really aimed at the press market and in that respect it was extremely successful. Most press photographers in the 'eighties were Nikon users. They had large collections of Nikkor lenses and they weren't that interested in autofocus anyway.

Some sports specialists thought autofocus would be a really nice idea but many of them were already migrating to Canon, so they weren't that interested in an autofocus Nikon body either. Despite this, the F4 had a long and successful run because it met the market's needs exactly. Nikon gradually introduced a range of competitive autofocus lenses and, in due course, a suitable camera to use them: the F5.

For the photographer who has no qualms about being noticed, the F4 is a superb machine, capable of stunning results when mated to the right lenses. The automatic exposure modes are first class and the purist merely needs to turn a dial to have full manual control.

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