Glass Bodies a variant-level encyclopedia of vintage lenses and cameras by iwillpat

Nikkormat FT3

Nippon Kogaku · Nikon F mount · 24×36mm on 35mm film, hinged back · 1977

via machine translation — corrections welcome

Also known as: Nikomat FT3 · Nikkormat FT-3 · ニコマートFT3

Variants & identification

Variant Mount Years Serial ranges Production
Nikkormat FT3 Nikon F 1977 — No figure published by Nikon
  1. No production figure has been published by Nikon. A figure of 128,000 circulates among collectors — mikeeckman.com reports having seen it but names no source for it — and it does not sit comfortably beside the claim that the camera was built for only a few months, since it is close to the total for the original FT across two years.
  2. No serial-number table for the FT3 has been published anywhere this project could find. Roland Vink's database, which carries serial blocks and quantities for Nikkor lenses and for the digital bodies, does not yet cover the manual-focus film cameras.
  3. Available in chrome and in black. The finish is not a variant: the black bodies cost $20 more and are otherwise the same camera.
  4. The AI coupling lever is movable. A small button at the edge of the mount releases it so the lever can be flipped up and locked clear, which lets a pre-AI lens be mounted — metered stopped down, since nothing then tells the meter the maximum aperture. Akagi Koichi treats the flip as the price of the AI mount's backward compatibility rather than a convenience.
  5. Nikon converted existing Nikkor lenses to AI coupling, and Akagi Koichi records that it did so at its own expense — a scale of spending he calls not the act of a sane company. The conversion is why so many pre-1977 Nikkors carry an AI ridge today, and why the FT3 meters with lenses older than itself.
  6. Relative production, on Mike Eckman's account: about three times as many FT2s were built as FT3s, and about eight times as many FTns. He gives no source for the ratio, and it rests on the same unattributed 128,000 that the paragraph above questions.
  7. Body weight is given as 756g by mikeeckman.com and 750g by ImagingPixel. The difference is within rounding of the same measurement and weight_g follows the higher figure, which is the one the Nikkormat FT shell is normally quoted at.
How to tell them apart (expand)
  • Shutter speed ring concentric with the lens mount instead of a top-plate dial — the Nikkormat F-series signature, and the reason the top plate looks bare
  • AI meter coupling lever on a ring around the mount
  • Match-needle meter readout on the top plate as well as in the finder
  • Mirror lock-up lever at the lower left of the lens mount
  • Model name engraved next to the serial number, which is the only quick way to separate an FT, FTN, FT2 and FT3 across a table

Nikkormat FT3:

  • A meter coupling lever on a ring around the lens flange, riding on the AI ridge — no rabbit-ear prong
  • 'NIKKORMAT FT3' engraved on the top plate beside the serial number

Specifications

Format
24×36mm on 35mm film, hinged back
Finder
Fixed pentaprism, non-interchangeable; fixed Type K screen with 3mm split-image rangefinder, 1mm microprism collar and a 12mm circle marking the meter's centre weighting · no rangefinder image
Shutter
Copal Square S, metal blade, vertical travel, focal plane · 1s – 1/1000 and B, mechanical throughout — no battery is needed to fire it · flash sync X at 1/125 · self-timer
Film advance
single-stroke lever; pulling it out roughly 20° switches the meter on
Back
hinged
Meter
TTL 60/40 centre-weighted CdS, match-needle, ASA 12–1600, one 1.5V silver cell (S76/SR44)
Motor drive
Not compatible — None. No Nikkormat in the mechanical F-series takes a winder or a motor drive; the coupling for the AW-1 Autowinder exists only on the electronic ELW and EL2.
Weight
756 g
Dimensions
146 × 95 × 54 (width × height × depth) mm
Country
Japan
Original price
$424.50 with the 50mm f/2 Nikkor, $519.50 with the f/1.4 and $618 with the 55mm f/1.2, black bodies $20 more (United States, December 1977). Reported from Modern Photography by a correspondent to mikeeckman.com rather than read off the page directly.
Accessories
AR-1, AR-2 and AR-3 cable releases · Type K focusing screen (fitted, not user-changeable)

Figures we worked out rather than found: Body dimensions are the Nikkormat FT figure, carried across because the FT3 uses the same shell. No separate FT3 measurement has been published.

Where sources disagree

Last
  • Manufactured for only several months in 1977, still available new from dealer stock in 1978 — Wikipedia, which calls it the shortest production run of any Nippon Kogaku SLR
  • Manufactured from 1977 to 1979 — camera-wiki.org; mikeeckman.com gives 1977–1979 while repeating the 'couple of months' claim and marking it unresolved
  • Two months, March to May 1977, ending when the Nikon FM went on sale — Oura Takeshi, PRONEWS, who is the only source located to name both months

The two claims may not be about the same thing: one describes how long the line ran, the other how long the camera was sold. Nothing published settles which. years.last is left unset rather than picked. Half of Oura's window does check out independently: Nikon's own history puts the FM on sale in May 1977, which is the event he says ended the FT3. The March start does not — it rests on his single machine-translated sentence, where Nikon's product history gives only the year, and it is the half worth confirming against a Japanese catalogue scan.

What reviewers say

History

The Nikkormat FT3 is the Nikkormat FT2 with one part changed. In 1977 Nippon Kogaku replaced the way a Nikkor lens tells the camera its maximum aperture: the rabbit-ear prong that had to be engaged over a pin and then indexed by twisting the aperture ring back and forth gave way to a machined ridge on the aperture ring that simply pushed a lever on a ring around the mount. That is the AI system, and it arrived with the Nikon FM. Everything Nippon Kogaku was still selling was converted to it in the same year — the F2 Photomic to the Photomic A, the Nikomat EL to the Nikon EL2, the Nikomat FT2 to this.

Nothing else moved. The shutter is the same Copal Square S, metal-bladed and vertical, running 1 second to 1/1000 with no battery involved. The meter is the same 60/40 centre-weighted CdS cell with its needle repeated on the top plate. The shutter speed ring is still wrapped around the lens mount rather than sitting on the top plate, which is the Nikkormat’s most obvious external habit and the one thing that makes the body instantly identifiable across a table of Nikons. The mirror still locks up. The camera still weighs 756 grams empty, which was heavy in 1965 and had become conspicuous by 1977, when the Olympus OM-1 and the Canon AE-1 had made small the selling point.

That weight is why the FT3 did not last. The Nikon FM went on sale in May 1977, built from scratch on a smaller chassis with a mirror box assembled from stamped panels rather than machined out of a single casting — Nikon’s own account of the FM is candid that the Nikomat casting was cheap to tool but impossible to automate. Wikipedia calls the FT3 a stopgap placeholder, and there is no reading of the year that makes it anything else.

How long that stopgap lasted is not settled. Wikipedia says several months of manufacture in 1977 with dealer stock into 1978, and calls it the shortest production run of any Nippon Kogaku SLR. Oura Takeshi, writing for PRONEWS, is more precise and shorter still: a March 1977 release and a two-month reign, ended by the FM in May. Camera-wiki says 1977 to 1979. A production figure of 128,000 circulates without a source attached to it, which would be a great many cameras for a few months’ work and roughly what the original FT managed in two years. No serial-number table for the model has been published: Roland Vink’s database, the best serial source for Nikon anything, covers the lenses and the digital bodies and has not yet reached the manual-focus film cameras. So the FT3 is a camera whose one interesting fact — that it barely existed — rests on an uncited sentence, and the arithmetic that would confirm or destroy it has not been done in public.

Expand Collapse

This history is AI-written, from the sources listed at the foot of the page. Where the record is silent it says so rather than filling the gap — but no human wrote these sentences.

Photographs

Nikkormat FT3
Nikkormat FT3 with the Ai Nikkor 28mm — BastienM, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Live listings

Asking price, USD: a median of $120 across 24 fixed-price listings on 2026-09-11 (middle half $50–$200). Tracked since 2026-09-06, 4 days: up 4% from $120.

By day
DateMedianMiddle halfListings
2026-09-11$120$50–$20024
2026-09-09$120$65–$25025
2026-09-08$120$50–$20026
2026-09-06$120$40–$20029

Asking prices from the listings scanned, not sales; junk-flagged rows and auction lots excluded; other currencies are not converted.

Show 27 more listings

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Listings updated 2026-09-11. Links go to the shop or marketplace that carries the item.

Related: Nikon EL2

Lenses for this body: Nikkor 135mm f/2.8

Sources (7)

Every page here is assembled from public sources, and the gaps are real ones. If you own this camera, know a serial number I'm missing, or can see where I have it wrong, tell me — corrections, serials and sample photos are all worth having.