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

Nikon F6

Nikon · Nikon F mount · 24×36mm on 35mm film, hinged back · 2004

Also known as: Nikon F6 35mm SLR · ニコンF6

Variants & identification

Variant Mount Years Serial ranges Production
Nikon F6 Nikon F 2004–2020 No block published No figure has been published
  1. Sixteen years in production and not one number to show for it: Nikon has published no production figure and no serial block for the F6, and none has appeared elsewhere. That is a larger silence than it looks, because the same is true of no other camera in the F line — the F's 862,600 is on record, and the F2, F3, F4 and F5 all have figures in circulation.
  2. Nikon's own product page and its printed specification sheet both carry the camera without a price. No manufacturer's launch list price has been found. The earliest figure in a written source is Ken Rockwell's US street price of $2,300 new in 2005, which his page then tracks at $2,400 in 2010, $2,450 from 2013 to 2018 and $2,549 in 2019, with used bodies at about $1,100 by 2024. Those are a retail-watcher's observations, not a Nikon list price.
  3. Two lens families the F6 cannot handle, both of them later than the camera: AF-P Nikkors will not focus on it at all, and electronic-diaphragm E-type lenses mount and expose but only at maximum aperture. Nikon offered a paid factory modification — $114 on Ken Rockwell's account — that lets pre-AI lenses mount, at the cost of stop-down metering. There is no program or shutter-priority mode with a manual-focus lens, and no permanent mirror lock-up for the 1960s ultrawides that intrude into the mirror box.
  4. Unlike every professional Nikon before it the F6's back has no safety catch: lifting the rewind crank opens it. Rockwell records Nikon's product number for the body as 1799, and notes that when the data back imprints the metering pattern it writes matrix metering as "AmP" — Automatic Multi-Pattern, the name the system carried on the FA of 1983 before Nikon settled on Matrix.
  5. Ken Rockwell's page heads the camera "2004-2023", against the October 2020 discontinuation Nikon announced and Kosmo Foto reported. Nothing on that page argues for the later date and it most likely marks when new stock ran out; it is recorded here so it is not mistaken for a second manufacturing date.
  6. Body construction: an aluminium-alloy die-cast chassis with a magnesium-alloy front body and magnesium top and bottom covers. Nikon's brochure illustrates the dust testing rather than quoting a sealing standard.
  7. 41 custom settings in six groups, held in four banks, driven from the rear LCD panel. The camera also records the exposure data of each frame — about 57 rolls of 36 in the 13-item basic form, or 31 rolls in the 21-item detailed form — and the MV-1 reader writes it out to a CompactFlash card as text.
  8. Assembled at Nikon's Sendai plant, which also built the F5 and the professional digital bodies.
How to tell them apart (expand)
  • A fixed pentaprism — alone in the F series, the finder is part of the camera
  • A monochrome LCD panel and a MENU button on the back, for a menu system rather than a bank of dials
  • Two CR123A lithium cells in the grip, and no vertical release at all unless the MB-40 is fitted; the F5's grip was integral and permanent
  • A 10-pin remote terminal on the front of the body
  • Smaller and lighter than the F5 it replaced, which is the visible consequence of making the grip an accessory

Nikon F6:

  • The prism does not come off; there is nothing else to distinguish one F6 from another

Specifications

Format
24×36mm on 35mm film, hinged back
Finder
Fixed eye-level pentaprism · 0.74× magnification · 100% coverage · no rangefinder image
Shutter
Electronically controlled vertical-travel focal plane. Blades of DuPont Kevlar and an aluminium alloy, with a Shutter Monitor that measures every release and compensates when the speed drifts from calibration. Tested to 150,000 cycles. · 30s – 1/8000 in 1/3 steps in S and M, plus B in manual, with timed exposures extendable to 30 minutes · flash sync X-contact only, to 1/250 — or to 1/8000 with Auto FP high-speed sync; ISO 519 terminal with a lock screw, and an ISO 518 hot shoe carrying digital data contacts · self-timer
Film advance
Integral motor, four modes: single; continuous low at about 2 frames a second, 4 with the MB-40; continuous high at about 5.5, 8 with the MB-40; and continuous silent at about 1, 2 with the MB-40. Automatic loading and rewind, a 36-exposure roll returning to the cassette in about 7 seconds, or 12 in silent mode.
Back
Hinged, with the data-imprint unit and the rear LCD panel built into it
Meter
TTL at full aperture, three meters in one body: 3D Colour Matrix off a 1,005-pixel RGB sensor, centre-weighted on a 12mm circle, and a 4mm spot. EV 0 to EV 20 for matrix and centre-weighted, EV 2 to EV 20 for spot, at ISO 100 with an f/1.4 lens. Film speed by DX from ISO 25 to 5000 or by hand from ISO 6 to 6400.
Motor drive
MB-40 Multi Power Battery Pack, MS-40 AA holder, MS-41 lithium holder (supplied) — The drive is inside the camera and always was; what the MB-40 adds is power and a grip. It takes eight AA cells of any chemistry or the EN-EL4 lithium-ion pack, brings a vertical release, an AF-start button, a multi-selector and command dials, and raises the top rate from 5.5 to 8 frames a second. That is the reverse of the F5, whose vertical grip was cast into the body and could not be taken off — the F6 is a smaller camera that can be made into a large one.
Designed by
Giugiaro Giorgetto — exterior design, through Italdesign, as on every professional Nikon since the F3 of 1980
Weight
975 g
Dimensions
157 × 119 × 78.5 mm
Country
Japan
Accessories
MB-40 Multi Power Battery Pack, with the MS-40 AA holder or the EN-EL4 lithium-ion battery · MV-1 Data Reader — transfers the shooting data held in the camera to a CompactFlash card · DR-5 right-angle finder, DG-2 eyepiece magnifier, DK-17 rubber eyecup, DK-17A antifog eyepiece · MC-20, MC-30, MC-21 and MC-23 remote cords; ML-3 infrared remote set · SB-800 and SB-600 Speedlights, for i-TTL and the Creative Lighting System

18mm eyepoint with built-in dioptre adjustment. The finder is fixed but the screen is not: a B-type BriteView Clear Matte II is standard, with six others catalogued (U, E, M, J, A and L), all ground glass and none of them affecting autofocus.

Where sources disagree

Finder dioptre range
  • −2.0 to +1 m⁻¹ — the specification table of Nikon's own F6 brochure
  • −3 to +1 m⁻¹ — the eyepiece-correction entry in the accessories section of the same brochure

The manufacturer contradicts itself inside one document, and nothing published resolves which figure the camera was actually built to.

Dimensions (mm)
  • 157 × 119 × 78.5 — Nikon's own specification sheet and its Japanese product page
  • 158 × 119 × 77.5 — English Wikipedia

Better supported: 157 × 119 × 78.5

A millimetre in two directions; the manufacturer's own figure is taken here.

What reviewers say

History

Nikon announced the F6 in September 2004 next to the D2X, a 12-megapixel professional digital body, and it is not obvious which of the two the company thought was the news. The F6 went on sale in October. It stayed on sale until October 2020, sixteen years, by which time it was — on English Wikipedia’s account — the last film SLR anywhere still being manufactured.

The break with the past is at the top of the camera. Every professional Nikon from 1959 onward had a finder that lifted off, and every one of them is catalogued by which finder was on it: the F by Photomic type, the F2 as F2, F2S, F2SB, F2A and F2AS, the F3 as F3, F3HP, F3T, F3P and F3AF. The F6’s prism is part of the body. There is no F6S, no F6HP, no titanium F6 and no press F6, and the reason is structural rather than commercial — a camera with a removable roof is a camera with a seam to seal, and by 2004 weatherproofing had beaten modularity. What remains interchangeable is the screen: seven types of ground glass, none of which affects the autofocus.

The engineering underneath is the last statement of a forty-five-year argument, made largely to itself. The shutter blades are Kevlar and aluminium alloy, tested to 150,000 cycles, and a Shutter Monitor checks the timing of every single release and corrects the drift. A mirror balancer cancels the bounce, which is what allows autofocus tracking to keep up at eight frames a second. The chassis is die-cast aluminium under magnesium covers. The camera keeps an exposure log of about fifty-seven rolls, downloadable to a CompactFlash card through a reader that costs extra — a film camera with a metadata problem, solved the way a digital camera would solve it.

Its most-copied decision was to make the grip removable. The F5’s vertical grip was cast into the body and weighed what it weighed; the F6 puts eight AA cells or a lithium-ion pack into an optional MB-40 and gives back a camera 975 grams bare. Every professional Nikon since has been sold that way.

What is missing from the record is almost everything a collector would want counted. Nikon has published no production figure for the F6 and no serial block — nothing, across sixteen years, in a line where the original F’s 862,600 has been public for decades. Nikon’s own product page and its printed specification sheet both omit the price. Even the dioptre range is given twice in the same brochure, as −2 to +1 in the specification table and −3 to +1 four pages later. The camera that audited its own shutter on every frame left no audit of itself.

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 F6
Nikon F6 — Unknown author, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0 fr)
Nikon F6
Nikon F6 with the AF-S 17–35mm — Michel Lefrancq (User:Tournachon), via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Nikon F6
EVA Air 777 landing at LAX — shot on a Nikon F6 (Glenn Beltz) — Glenn Beltz from Goleta, CA, USA, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Live listings

Asking price, USD: a median of $1,800 across 40 fixed-price listings on 2026-09-06 (middle half $1,600–$2,000). First day tracked.

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

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eBay links are affiliate links. If you buy through one, Glass Bodies earns a small commission from eBay at no cost to you. It does not change which listings appear, their prices or their order — those come from the search and the sort described above.

Listings updated 2026-09-05. Links go to the shop or marketplace that carries the item.

Related: Nikon F100

Lenses for this body: AF DC-Nikkor 105mm f/2D · Ai AF Nikkor 28mm f/1.4D

Sources (9)

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.