I have owned many different cameras, starting off with a Yashica TL Electro, a cracking camera, with the old M42 screw thread lens fitting, i sold them to move on the Pentax, when the ME Super came out, bought a Mamiya C330, when i turned proffesional, (Couldn't afford the Hassleblad at the time), sold the Pentax gear and bought the new Minolta 7000, the first Autofocus SLR, sold it after about 3 rolls of films, it was crap, that put me off autofocus for a while !
Then i bought a Nikon, can't remember what model it was, but then ended up becoming a bit of a Nikon collector, i must have had, at the same time every Nikon SLR since the F2, even had an old Nikkormat FT-2, a well built camera, ended up selling most of the Nikon manual focus cameras.
I Moved into Autofocus with the Nikon F-50, bought the later F60 when that came out, but there was always something missing from these two cameras, still they were very good cameras, i sold them and bought myself an older F-601, a much better camera than both the F-50 & F-60, the only bad thing about the 601 is the weight, so i have just bought myself the newer Nikon F-80, i could have bought into another system, as i sold the 601 and the older AF lenses, but i don't think anything else comes close to the Nikon build quality, even though the F-80 is built in Nikons Thailand factory, i wasn't put off by that, as i still has that Nikon feel that cameras that used to be built in Japan had, apparantly it would cost too much to produce in Japan, the F-60 was produced in Japan, and the F-80 feels as good if not better quality than the F60.
I haven't used the F-80 yet, i'm waiting the a break in the weather, but as soon as i do, i will have photo's taken with it on this website.
Well i got to use my new F-80 on the 7th of August 2003, taking it to North Wales for a few days, it didn't take too long to get use to it, the dials and buttons are pretty straight forward, i did have a slight problem to start with, as the one command dial was set to "Multi Exposure" but after that the camera performed without any problem.
I'm glad that i purchased the MB-16 battery pack, as it gives the camera a better feel to it, well worth the extra cost, and the fact that you can use AA size batteries is a big plus point.
As soon as i get the photo's back from the lab, they will be on the next page.
