Nikon FG
Nippon Kogaku · Nikon F mount · 24×36mm on 35mm film, hinged back · 1982
Also known as: Nikon FG-20 · Nippon Kogaku Nikon FG · ニコンFG
Variants & identification
| Variant | Mount | Years | Serial ranges | Production |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nikon FG | Nikon F | 1982–1984 | — | No figure published |
| Nikon FG-20 | Nikon F | 1984 | — | No figure published |
- No production figure has been published for the FG or the FG-20. klassik-cameras.de records only that the FG sold worse than expected and was taken out of production after two years.
- The end of the family is not on the record. The FG stopped in 1984; when the FG-20 stopped has not been published, which is why no closing year is given here.
- Programmed exposure needed the body to set the aperture, and the F bayonet was not built for it. Nikon's F2 answer had been an external servo unit turning the aperture ring — the DS-11 and DS-12 EE Control Units — which was too elaborate for a camera of this class. The alternative was to push the automatic diaphragm lever partway, and the amount of stop-down that produced differed from lens to lens.
- So the lens line was changed first. The AI-S standard made the lever's travel roughly proportional to the number of stops, and Nikon put the same mechanism into the Series E lenses announced beside the EM at PMA in the spring of 1979 — three years before the FG needed it, and without saying what it was for. Nikon's own history records that camera magazines noticed the unexplained boss and recess on the new lenses and guessed at the reason, mostly correctly, but that nobody connected them to the diaphragm lever.
- Instant stop-down metering has a cost the camera cannot hide: the mirror cannot rise until the aperture has been set and remeasured, so release lag is long by design, and light entering the eyepiece skews the reading. Nikon used the method until the F-501 of April 1986 and then moved to full-aperture control.
- Reviewers who call the FG a plastic camera are describing the outside of it. Wikipedia's specification gives a copper-silumin aluminium alloy body under a polycarbonate exterior and synthetic leatherette covering — a metal chassis in a plastic shell, which is why the camera can feel hollow in the hand and still hold its alignment.
- Aaron Gold, writing for Popular Photography in 2022, names two details no other source examined mentions: that the shutter is a bought-in Seiko rather than a Nikon design, and that setting the self-timer raises the mirror ahead of the exposure. Neither is confirmed elsewhere here, and both are recorded as his.
- How long the FG stayed in production is not agreed. Wikipedia gives 1982 to 1984 and klassik-cameras.de says it was withdrawn after two years; Richard Haw writes that it was "only made for 4 years" before the FG-20 replaced it. The two-year reading is followed here and the disagreement is recorded below rather than resolved.
How to tell them apart
- The first Nikon with programmed exposure and the first with through-the-lens flash metering off the film
- The EM's body shell, with a shutter-speed dial added
- Vertical metal shutter, 1/1000 top speed, flash sync at 1/90
Nikon FG:
- P on the mode dial, and an LED dot array down the finder reading the shutter speed
- The sash is back: a black-painted band between the covering and the covers, which the EM did without
- A detachable finger grip on the front right
Nikon FG-20:
- No P on the dial — aperture priority and manual only
- A meter needle in the finder in place of the FG's LED array
- No off-the-film flash metering; automatic flash control only
- No detachable grip, and more plastic in the body
- Nikon FG: Chrome-topped and all-black finishes. Ranked in Nikon's line between the EM and the FE, and given programmed automation and off-the-film flash that the dearer FE did not have — while losing the FE's depth-of-field preview and its aperture direct-readout window, to keep the two apart.
- Nikon FG-20: February 1984, and a step backwards on purpose: the programmed mode, the off-the-film flash metering and the exposure-compensation dial all came out. Nikon's own history treats it as the second half of one article about the FG; Wikipedia and camera-wiki give it a page of its own. It is carried here as a variant of the same family because it is the same body with functions removed. 440g, 136 × 88 × 54mm, finder 0.86× at 92% coverage.
Serial-range notes
- no published list
- No serial-number list has been published for the FG or the FG-20, and none for the EM they descend from.
Specifications
- Format
- 24×36mm on 35mm film, hinged back
- Finder
- Fixed eye-level pentaprism, fixed Nikon K-type screen — clear matte Fresnel field, central split-image rangefinder spot, microprism collar; shutter speed on a red LED dot array · 0.84× magnification · 92% coverage · no rangefinder image
- Shutter
- Vertical travel, metal blades, focal plane, electronically timed with a mechanical fallback · 1s – 1/1000 in P, A and M; M90 (mechanical 1/90) and B without batteries · flash sync 1/90, hot shoe only — there is no PC socket · self-timer
- Film advance
- Single-stroke lever
- Back
- Hinged
- Meter
- Through-the-lens centre-weighted metering, 60/40, from a silicon photodiode, EV 1 to EV 18 at ISO 100. A second silicon photodiode at the base of the mirror box faces backwards and reads the light reflected off the film during the exposure, which gives the camera off-the-film flash control. Programmed exposure works by instant stop-down metering: the body starts the diaphragm closing and stops it when the metering circuit says so.
- Motor drive
- MD-14, MD-E — The MD-E is the EM's drive at two frames a second. The MD-14's rate is given as 3.2 frames a second by Wikipedia and as up to 3.5 by camera-wiki.
- Weight
- 490 g
- Dimensions
- 139 × 86 × 53 mm
- Country
- Japan
- Original price
- $322.50 in the United States; around DM 550–600 in Germany, reduced to DM 418 by 1986 (today $1,050)
- Accessories
- Motor Drive MD-14 · Motor Drive MD-E · Detachable finger grip · Speedlight SB-15
Where sources disagree
- Last
- 1982 to 1984, two years (Wikipedia; klassik-cameras.de, which says it was taken out of production after two years)
- "only made for 4 years", which puts the end at 1986 (Richard Haw, Classic Nikon Repair and Review)
Better supported: the two-year reading, which two independent sources give and which the maker's own dating fits
Nikon's products-history page for the 1980s dates the FG to 1982 and the FG-20 to 1984, and describes the FG-20 as an upgraded EM rather than a parallel model, which is the handover the two-year reading describes. No production figure and no serial list exist for either camera, so nothing internal to the record settles it beyond that. Haw's four years may be counting the FG-20 as the same camera, but he does not say so.
What reviewers say
- Josh Solomon (Casual Photophile) (blog) — Argues the FG is one of the best amateur cameras on the used market for its 60/40 meter and its LED readout in low light, while conceding the body feels hollow and fragile beside a metal Nikon, that there is no exposure lock, that the mirror slaps hard, and that its electronics fail more often than other Nikon SLRs — and blames its reputation on buyers expecting professional durability from a Nikon badge.
- Aaron Gold (Popular Photography) (blog) — Accepts why Nikon owners disliked it — plastic exterior, a bought-in Seiko shutter, an odd two-piece advance lever, and a body that shudders when it fires — and defends it anyway as three ounces lighter than an FE, workable one-handed, and giving pictures as good as any Nikon; he notes the programmed mode and off-the-film flash left with it and reappeared in the FA.
- Richard Haw (Classic Nikon Repair and Review) (blog) — Calls it feature-packed and flimsy in the same sentence, and from inside the body reports a shutter that will last hundreds of rolls rather than indefinitely, finder foam that has degraded on every example, screws running into plastic threads that cross-thread easily, and a very delicate ISO-selector brush — then advises against buying a broken one, because repair costs more than the camera.
- Richard Kowalski (EMULSIVE) (blog) — Writing after 34 years with the FG-20, reports that his cameras came back into use without missing a beat, and values the stepless aperture-priority shutter — it will run at 1/75 or 1/840 if that is the correct exposure — and the size, while acknowledging it is looked down on as a beginner's camera and that it gave up the TTL flash metering the FG had.
History
The Nikon FG is a cheap camera carrying an expensive problem. Nikon released it in May 1982 as its first SLR with programmed automatic exposure, four years after the Canon A-1 opened that market and after the Canon AE-1 Program and the Minolta X-700 had confirmed it. The delay was not indecision. Programmed exposure requires the body to set the aperture, and the F bayonet of 1959 had never been designed to let it.
Nikon had solved it once already, on the F2, by bolting on an EE Control Unit that turned the lens’s aperture ring with a servo motor — an answer that could not be miniaturised into a camera meant to sit between the EM and the FE. The only other route was the automatic diaphragm lever every Nikkor already had, and that lever was built to be pushed all the way or released all the way. Stopped halfway it produced a different aperture on every lens; near the small end its travel almost vanished. Controlling exposure through it, accurately, was not possible with the lenses that existed.
So the lenses were changed before the camera was. The AI-S standard made the lever’s movement roughly proportional to the number of stops, and it reached the market in the early spring of 1980 — but the same mechanism had already shipped a year earlier in the Series E lenses launched beside the EM at the Chicago PMA show. Camera magazines examined the odd boss and the recess in the new mounts and published guesses, most of which Nikon’s own history says were right; none of them connected the parts to the diaphragm lever. The groundwork for programmed exposure had been laid in public, three years early, and gone unread.
The FG meters by instant stop-down: it starts the diaphragm closing, watches the light, and halts the diaphragm when the reading arrives, then sets the shutter from a second measurement. It is accurate, and it is slow — the mirror cannot rise until all of that has happened, so the lag between the release and the exposure is long by design, and light coming in through the eyepiece affects the result. Nikon kept the method until the F-501 of 1986 and then abandoned it for full-aperture control.
The body is the EM’s with a shutter-speed dial added, and Nikon put back the sash — the painted black band between the covering and the top and bottom covers, dropped from the EM to save a step that failed inspections and slowed the line. The designer interviewed for the EM had kept returning to its absence. On the FG it is a claim to rank, and the FG was given programmed exposure and off-the-film flash metering that the dearer FE never had, while being denied the FE’s depth-of-field preview and aperture readout so that the order of the line stayed legible.
In February 1984 the FG-20 replaced it by removing things: no programmed mode, no off-the-film flash, no compensation dial, a needle in the finder instead of the LED array, no grip. The FG itself stopped that year, after two, having sold worse than Nikon expected.
Nothing quantitative survives. No production figure has been published for either camera, no serial-number list exists for the FG, the FG-20 or the EM beneath them, and the date the FG-20 left production is not on the record — which is why this entry carries no closing year. What the FG is documented for is what it proved: within eighteen months the off-the-film flash metering was in the FE2, and the same stop-down control developed on the other track was running the programmed mode of the FA.
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
Live listings
Asking price, USD: a median of $230 across 11 fixed-price listings on 2026-09-11 (middle half $110–$230). Tracked since 2026-09-06, 2 days: unchanged from $230.
By day
| Date | Median | Middle half | Listings |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-09-11 | $230 | $110–$230 | 11 |
| 2026-09-06 | $230 | $180–$230 | 13 |
Asking prices from the listings scanned, not sales; junk-flagged rows and auction lots excluded; other currencies are not converted.
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