Another car boot sale find, i bought it for the lens actually - i need a Nikon lens for my Nikon F4s so the price of 50 pence sounded right to me and i got the camera with it.
The camera comes from the late 70's (1979 to be exact) and it was aimed at the inexperienced photographer who wanted to know nothing about exposure but just focus, point and shoot (although you had to select the aperture).
The Nikon EM is a diminutive camera, it took Nikon almost a decade to catch up with the trend first started by the Olympus OM-1 back in 1972. With the EM, Nikon presented their E-series lenses, compact in design to complement the EM, FG, FG-20 etc.. The EM is very straight forward camera to use. You turn the selector to B (for Bulb), M90 for a mechanical back up speed and Auto. The camera is compatible with AI lenses (Automatic Indexing) and has it's own dedicated motor-winder called MD-E.
The first impressions when you pick up this camera are very good. Very compact and quite heavy for it's size, a typical well made Nikon. It is a rather pretty looking camera designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro, the person behind the design of the Nikon F3 and F4. The viewfinder is decent but nowhere near the magnification or clarity of the Pentax MX, or ME. On the left there is the shutter scale and a needle points
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| The mode selector |
towards the speed that the camera automatically selects. The aperture is not visible in the viewfinder. If the selected shutter speed is below 1/30 you get a very annoying "bleeeeep". Extremely annoying, i would be very happy to di-solder the little speaker if i could find it. On the front of the camera there is the exposure compensation button that adds two stops to exposure when needed. Advancing the film is just sensational. So smooth that puts in shame the next better film advance of the Minolta XD-7.
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| Size comparison. EM vs ME vs 9xi |
But despite the initial good impressions, while using the camera i was left rather cold. First of all, i find the automatic bleeper annoying. Another thing that i did not enjoy is the fact that the mirror is quite loud and not well dumped. Exposure is relatively accurate, certainly good enough for b&w negative films. When i developed the negatives, i noticed that the film transport mechanism was leaving uneven spaces between the frames, resulting in overlaps in certain occasions. Another thing i didn't like was the fact that once you load it with film, the shutter fires in 1/1000 and the light meter engages only when you have reached frame No1. This means that exposures "00" and "0" will not exposure correctly, pity because i can squeeze two extra frames out from my Pentaxes but not from this Nikon.
Conclusion
I cannot say that this Nikon managed to impress me. Yes, it is well made and has a massive Nikon system to support it, fair enough. Despite all these, certain ergonomic issues (bleeper, average viewfinder, two frames per film less, inability to override automatic exposure toward underexposure) means that for me, the real deal is the Pentax ME. Not only it is even smaller in size and addresses all the above issues, it also comes in two flavors, simple (a la Nikon EM) and super. Rumors say that the Nikon FG is even better, but until then I'll keep the Pentax....