Hidden Treasure?
I was busy during the past weekend helping my brother-in-law to move into his next apartment. While packing up and checking items to be disposed, I came across an old camera bag that attracted my attention.
Inside is a Nikon EM camera, a Single-Lens Reflex (SLR) camera that use film for recording.
The Nikon EM is a very small SLR just like the first Digital SLR that I had – Nikon D5200.
From what I learnt from the Wiki, Nikon EM is a compact SLR introduced in 1979 and was targeted for the growing market of women photographers at that time.
Unlike other Nikon SLR, the EM is designed to be a simple and easy to use camera. It only offers the aperture priority exposure control and the camera with automatically selected the shutter speed for the right exposure.
In case you ran out of battery (as in my case where the battery chamber lib was damaged by the leaked Silver-Oxide batteries!), there is a Mechanical Shutter (M90) that provides a shutter speed of 1/90 second.
There is also an exposure compensation button at the front to provide two stops of shutter speed compensation.
From the serial number of the len (2003918), this Nikon EM should be manufactured during the period from 1981 to 1985.
Both the body and the len were “Made In Japan“, somethings that are only applicable to those high-end Nikon equipment nowadays.
The 35mm/2.5 is a mechanical prime len with Nikon F-mount. I expected it to be still functioning and so I plugged it into my Nikon D610. Wow, despite those dirt and stains, the image is still acceptable.
Reduce the aperture to f/4.0, the image is quite sharp.
Using this film based camera is not an easy task for me as I lacked the required film development and processing support. However, it may be a good idea to restore this 35mm/2.5 Series E len and have it as part of my Nikon len collection.
Interesting enough, I observed that most of Nikon EM posts that I found are somehow related to finding the camera during household cleanup or relocation.
