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Lightweight is the watch word here, yet the F75 has professional features. It is a favourite of ours for walk about shooting. It’s small size, manual and auto settings. At  about 400 grams and 130 mm long the F75 is a very easy camera to carry with you.  Being largely plastic you could think the F75 is a weak breakable camera. All cameras will break if mistreated and the 75 is no exception, however we can say from an extensive Paris experience the F75 is plenty strong enough. The F75 lived from 2003 to 2006 when it was displaced by mainstream Nikon digital offerings.

The camera needs 2xCR2 lithium batteries which are ususally good for about 40x36frame film rolls in normal temperatures. Cold conditions mean less battery life. Shutter speeds of 30 secs to 1/2000 are good for most situations with timed release available in manual setting. The F75 has a built in speed light – good for fill flash. An unusual feature of the F75 is film loading where the film is completely prewound  out of the canister then wound back into the film canister as frames are exposed. The beauty of this design is if the back were to be inadvertently opened with film loaded then all the exposed frames are protected back in the film canister and only as yet unexposed frames will be fogged. Quite a neat design. Except frames are numbered in reverse and the frame counter indicates how many frames are left rather than how many are already exposed.

The F75 accepts all F mount AF lenses but if a manual focus lens is mounted the exposure meter cannot function so a hand held meter is a good accessory to have handy. Very handily, when focusing the manual lens, the in vewfinder focus confirmation dot appears when focus is achieved. There are around 15 obscure Nikon lenses which cannot be used with the F75 for varying reasons. Best to refer to the manual to check these.  We mounted a Nikkor AFD 28-45 macro zoom for our Paris trip and found this versatile and a good match with the F75. I prefer prime lenses these days so would probably be more likely to select a Nikkor 35mm F2 and have a Nikkor 50mm F1.4 in my bag. Both lenses suit the F75 very well. The 35mm for the wider angle architectural shots and the 50mm for tighter street shooting. Don’t worry about the F75D version (frame date and time stamp) as, although this can be turned off the buttons clutter the film chamber door and the system uses the camera main battery. You can’t go wrong with a well looked after F75 plus the Nikkor 50mm lens. The almost perfect travel combination. We say almost as nothing is totally perfect and the detraction from the F75 is lack of weather sealing. If you are travelling to a seriously damp place better to pack a different camera.