Recently I purchased a Nikon 35Ti compact film camera. Its Nikon's high end pocket camera from the
early 1990's and features an ultra sharp retractable 35mm f2.8 lens, titanium
construction and the world's most awesome analogue camera display. Just the display alone makes it look
expensive, and when it was released almost 20 years ago, it was indeed
expensive at $1000+ MSRP.
It's a very weird and quirky camera with an automatic flash
that you can't turn off automatic mode, though it has two override buttons, one
to switch the flash on or switch it off, if it decides to come on.......or not
come on. Follow me? These buttons,
located on the front of the camera are so small and inset, that the tiniest
fingers will have difficulty selecting them.
You also manually have to select red-eye flash mode via a
button on the side of the camera, and the panoramic mode is very easy to
accidentally select. Fortunately there
is an icon in the finder to warn you of this.
If you like vintage analogue watches, the dials are a whole
lotta awesome. There is a dial for
aperture, focus distance, a counter and for exposure compensation. For some weird reason, the one I bought is
out by one stop when showing the aperture.
The viewfinder display is actually quite good, being bright
and displaying tons of information. It
also has a frameline that corrects for parallex for close up photos, similar to
the Fuji GA645i I also have.
The film I have shot though it is still being develped, but
I am expecting the results to be good. I
shot E6, so I am hoping that the meter is accurate enough to not ruin the
shots.
Overall - this camera is an interesting study in weirdness,
especially in operation. If I didn't
know I was shooting Nikon, I would have thought it a Fuji, as the X-100 is also
a bit like this. The test will remain
when I get the film back to see just how good the shots are.
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