Nikon EM

Nippon Kogaku · Nikon F mount · 24×36mm on 35mm film, hinged back · 1979

Also known as: Nippon Kogaku Nikon EM · ニコンEM

Variants & identification

Variant	Mount	Years	Serial ranges	Production
Nikon EM	Nikon F	1979–1982	—	No factory figure published

Nikon has published no production figure for the EM. The German collector site klassik-cameras.de reports that "a total of 1.5 million Nikon EMs are said to have been sold" — hedged in the source, and repeated here with the hedge intact. No factory number supports it.
The EM was designed downward from first principles rather than cut down from an FM. Nikon's account says the plan to build it on the FM body was abandoned and the basic mechanisms started again, with the film-winding mechanism rebuilt to use the fewest possible gears. The lever was placed between the take-up spool and the sprocket, which left too little room for its rest position, so a mid-folding lever was devised.
That winding mechanism can advance in fractions of a stroke, which the dearer FM and FE cannot. The engineer responsible gave his reason to Nikon's own interviewer as "I don't like cameras that cannot wind fractionally !".
The EM took the plastic exterior further than Nikon had gone before — the FM and FE had used engineering plastics for the apron and name plate, the EM for the top and bottom covers as well. An internal department was formed to study the material, and its work carried into later cameras. Mike Eckman describes the result as polycarbonate panels over an aluminium body.
Mike Eckman puts manufacture at 1979 to 1982 with remaining stock sold through 1984, which is the only account found of what happened after the line ended. Nikon publishes nothing on either date.
The camera beeps. An audible warning sounds when the metered speed falls outside what the shutter can deliver, and Mike Caputo, who otherwise likes the camera, calls it annoying and counts it as one of the EM's two real faults — the other being a film-advance lever he describes as horrible and stiff.

How to tell them apart (expand)

No manual exposure control of any kind — aperture priority, a mechanical 1/90, and B
A single backlight button worth two stops in place of a compensation dial
The cheapest camera Nikon had released to that date

Nikon EM:

All black, with plastic top and bottom covers — no chrome version was catalogued
No sash: the raised step where the covering meets the covers stands in for the painted band on an FE
A mode collar with AUTO, M90 and B, and no shutter-speed dial at all
A mid-folding film-advance lever, set between the take-up spool and the sprocket

Nikon EM: Nikon's own history records a yellow-trimmed camera in a private collection and describes brighter leather as a road not taken; the catalogued camera is black.

Serial-range notes

no published list: No serial-number list for the EM has been published. Nothing of the kind that exists for the F and the F2 was ever assembled for the compact bodies.

Specifications

Format: 24×36mm on 35mm film, hinged back
Finder: Fixed eye-level pentaprism, fixed focusing screen with a 3mm split-image spot and a 1mm microprism collar · no rangefinder image
Shutter: Seiko MFC-E, vertical travel, focal plane, electronically timed · 1s – 1/1000 in automatic; M90 (mechanical 1/90) and B without batteries · flash sync 1/90
Film advance: Single-stroke lever, mid-folding, capable of winding in fractions of a stroke
Back: Hinged
Meter: Through-the-lens centre-weighted metering, 60/40, over EV 2 to EV 18; aperture-priority automation with no manual mode and no off-the-film flash control; film speed set from ISO 25 to 1600. One silicon photodiode (SPD), on Nikon's published specification; two collector accounts say CdS instead — see the disputed record.
Motor drive: MD-E — Two frames a second. Giorgetto Giugiaro redrew the MD-E along the lines of the F3's MD-4, with the bottom slanted and protruding, and the body casting was changed to suit it.
Designed by: Giorgetto Giugiaro — exterior design, and the redrawn MD-E motor drive
Weight: 460 g
Dimensions: 135 × 86 × 54 mm
Country: Japan
Original price: $144.95 for the body in the United States, $189.95 with the 50mm f/1.8 Series E; DM 435 in Germany in 1979, cut to DM 285 by 1982 (today $626)
Accessories: Motor Drive MD-E · Speedlight SB-E · Series E lenses · Dedicated cases and eyepiece adapter

A needle over a shutter-speed scale. Nothing in the finder reports the aperture, because nothing in the camera reads it.

Where sources disagree

Meter

Silicon photodiode — Nikon's own specification sheet, transcribed at mir.com.my: "TTL center-weighted exposure metering at full aperture; meter incorporates one silicon photodiode (SPD)". English Wikipedia reads the same way.
CdS cells (klassik-cameras.de; Mike Eckman, who specifies a TTL centre-weighted CdS meter with needle readout)

Better supported: Silicon photodiode (SPD)

Settled by the maker's own figures. The specification sheet transcribed at mir.com.my is the EM's published one — its metering range of EV 2 to EV 18 at ASA 100 with the 50mm f/1.8 is the same line this entry's meter field carries — and it names one silicon photodiode. The two CdS readings are compilations without a cited source, and the German site's criticism that the cells react more slowly than the competition's is an argument that only works on its own reading. Recorded rather than deleted because CdS is what a reader will meet on both collector sites.

What reviewers say

Josh Solomon (Casual Photophile) (blog) — Argues the EM is near perfect for a beginner precisely because the aperture ring is the only thing left to think about, and rates the Series E 50mm f/1.8 the best standard kit lens in the consumer SLR class — while using the camera's continued unpopularity as evidence that the film community values how a camera looks over what it does. His reservation is the camera's own: aperture priority and nothing else, no manual mode at all.
Mike Eckman (mikeeckman.com) (blog) — Scores it 8 out of 10 and defends it against its reputation: it is a real Nikon on the full F mount, 460 grams, with a metal-bladed vertical shutter rather than cloth. He does not deny what is missing — no mirror lock-up, no depth-of-field preview, no manual exposure — but argues every one of those was missing from its price-class rivals too.
Mike Caputo (35mmc) (blog) — Bought his for five dollars and would call it a bargain at fifty: under a pound, tougher than the plastic suggests, and workable in manual by setting the aperture to force the speed he wants. Two things he will not forgive — the film-advance lever, which he calls horrible and stiff, and the warning beep.
Ed Lara (35mmc) (blog) — Comparing it against a Pentax MV-1 and an Olympus XA in a search for a compact SLR: the finder is bright and quick to focus and the backlight button is worth its two stops, but with a normal lens the EM is the bulkier camera and with the MD-E fitted it is bulkier still, so he ends up filing it under portraits and landscapes rather than street work.

History

The Nikon EM was built to meet a market Nikon had not served. Nikon’s own history describes the brief without embarrassment: a small, easy camera aimed at women, against a field of heavy and — the word is Nikon’s — “uncute” SLRs. The Olympus OM series had started the move to compactness in 1972; the Pentax MX and ME of late 1976 arrived while the EM was in development and sharpened it. The internal target, as Nikon puts it, should naturally have been the smallest 35mm SLR in the world, smaller than the ME, and Nikon’s own page declines to say whether that was achieved.

The engineering is more interesting than the brief. The first plan was to build the camera on the FM body; that was abandoned and the mechanisms restarted from the bottom, with the film advance rebuilt around the fewest gears that would do. Placing the winding lever between the take-up spool and the sprocket left too little room for the lever to rest, so a mid-folding lever was designed. The unusual consequence is that the EM winds in fractions of a stroke, which neither the FM nor the FE — both dearer cameras — will do. The engineer responsible defended it flatly: he did not like cameras that could not wind fractionally.

Above that mechanism sits a camera with almost no controls. There is no shutter-speed dial: a collar around the release offers AUTO, a mechanical M90 and B. There is no manual exposure mode. Compensation is one button, worth two stops, for backlit subjects. The finder shows a needle against a scale and never reports the aperture, because nothing in the camera reads it. Metering is centre-weighted 60/40 off a single silicon photodiode, which is what Nikon’s own specification sheet says; two collector accounts give CdS instead — klassik-cameras.de and Mike Eckman — and the German site’s complaint that the cells are slow only makes sense on that reading. What the camera does do, when the metered speed runs off the end of the scale, is beep.

Giorgetto Giugiaro, who styled the F3, took the exterior; his most visible contribution is the MD-E motor drive, redrawn on the lines of the F3’s MD-4 with a slanted protruding base, which forced a change to the body casting. The final camera came out all black, which Nikon notes was already a departure from the brief it started with.

Nikon was uneasy enough about the price to stage the launch. The EM was announced at the PMA show in Chicago in March 1979 rather than at the Japan Camera Show held days earlier, and it did not reach the Japanese market until March 1980 — the same month as the F3, and dressed for Japan with leather trim, because a camera this cheap carrying the name was thought a risk to it. A Japanese magazine bought one in the United States and reviewed it in October 1979 under the heading of whether it would be sold at home at all.

No production figure has been published. A German collector site reports that 1.5 million are said to have been sold, hedged in exactly those terms, and no factory number stands behind it. No serial-number list exists for the EM or for any of the compact bodies that followed it. The line it began ran three more years to the FG and the FG-20; how many of any of them were built is not on the record.

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

Nikon EM with the Series E 28mm — dw_ross from Springfield, VA, USA, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Live listings

Asking price, USD: a median of $30 across 8 fixed-price listings on 2026-09-11 (middle half $8–$95). Tracked since 2026-09-06, 2 days: unchanged from $30.

By day

Date	Median	Middle half	Listings
2026-09-11	$30	$8–$95	8
2026-09-06	$30	$8–$95	8

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

Nikon EM Photo Guide Reno — $7.00 · Retro Photo Reading · likely EM
Nikon EM AR Button — $8.00 · Retro Photo Reading · likely EM
Nikon EM Charge Over Knob 0 — $15.00 · Retro Photo Reading · likely EM
Nikon EM Actuating Unit 0 — $30.00 · Retro Photo Reading · likely EM
Nikon EM Black 35mm Film Camera Body [EXC-] — $59.95 · Victory Camera · likely EM
Nikon EM W/ Rokunar 52mm Lens & SB-E Flash — $95.00 · eBay · likely EM
NIKON EM 35m SLR FILM CAMERA WITH ZYKKOR MC ZOOM LENS — $99.99 · eBay · likely EM
Nikon EM 35mm film SLR camera 50mm 1:1.8 Lens w/ flash, leather case Used — $235.00 · eBay · likely EM
Nikon EM Black Film Camera Kiron 80-200mm F/4.5 Macro MC Lens [Exc+4] — £70.55 · eBay · likely EM
NIKON EM + NIKON SERIES E 50mm 1.8 — £75.00 · eBay · likely EM
Nikon EM 50mm f/1.8 NIKON SERIES E Black Manual Focus SLR Film Camera — £150.18 · eBay · likely EM

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