The F mount has been made since 1959 and this section holds more families than any other, so these six are the door and not the house. I have kept to the manual-focus era, where the used market is deepest and nothing needs a battery to take a picture, and I have preferred the lenses that come on the page with all their barrels so that a reader can see which version the seller is offering.
Stories · Buyer's guides · Nikon F
Where to start with the Nikon F system
A fifty for the price of lunch, the 105 that made a magazine cover, and the last manual Nikon.
Lenses
Entry level — the cheapest way in that is still the real thing
Nikkor 50mm f/2 (F mount)
The standard lens Nikon sold with a million bodies. Every barrel from the 1959 Nikkor-S to the Ai-S is on one page, all of them sharp and all of them cheap because there is never a shortage. Buy one and spend what you saved on film.
Asking today: around $110 (middle half $70–$150) — median of 57 fixed-price USD listings on 2026-09-11
Also consider Micro-Nikkor 55mm f/3.5 .
Best value — the most lens or camera for the money
Nikkor 105mm f/2.5
Steve McCurry's Afghan Girl was made with this lens, and so were half the portraits in every newspaper of the 1970s. A Sonnar type until 1971 and a Gauss type after, both on the page, and both asking less than a modern 85mm at f/1.8.
Asking today: around $180 (middle half $150–$300) — median of 43 fixed-price USD listings on 2026-09-11
Also consider Nikkor 105mm f/1.8 .
Collector level — the one the reference books are about
Noct-Nikkor 58mm f/1.2
The first Nikkor with an aspherical surface, hand-ground, made to hold a point of light as a point in the corner of the frame at f/1.2. Twenty years in production and never many in a year; the price says so.
Asking today: around $3,600 (middle half $3,000–$4,100) — median of 19 fixed-price USD listings on 2026-09-11
Also consider Nikkor 13mm f/5.6 .
Bodies
Entry level — the cheapest way in that is still the real thing
Nikkormat FTn
An F built for amateurs: the same lens mount, a metal shutter, a meter in the prism and no removable finder to lose. It weighs what a professional camera weighs and costs less than a lens cap for one.
Asking today: around $85 (middle half $56–$130) — median of 42 fixed-price USD listings on 2026-09-11
Also consider Nikon FE .
Best value — the most lens or camera for the money
Nikon F2
The last all-mechanical professional Nikon, with interchangeable finders and a shutter that runs without a battery to ten seconds. The market has moved on to the F3 and the FM2; the F2 sells for a third of what the same money bought in 1975, and it is the better-made camera.
Asking today: around $300 (middle half $230–$420) — median of 242 fixed-price USD listings on 2026-09-11
Also consider Nikon F .
Collector level — the one the reference books are about
Nikon FM3A
Nikon's last manual-focus body, made from 2001 to 2006 with a shutter that runs every speed mechanically and every speed on aperture priority. It closes the line the F opened and is the one an FM2 owner trades up to.
Asking today: around $1,000 (middle half $920–$1,200) — median of 30 fixed-price USD listings on 2026-09-10
Also consider Nikon F6 .
The picks and the reasons are editorial and AI-written from the family pages, which say where each claim comes from. The prices are read from the listings I scan on the day the page was built — a median of a handful of asking prices, not a valuation, and not what anything sold for. Updated 2026-09-07.