That moment I realized I'd been misreading shutter speeds for 20 years

I was going through a box of old repair manuals I got from a retired Nikon tech last month. Buried in there was a handwritten note about how the engraved shutter speed numbers on certain F-mount bodies from the 70s don't match actual calibrated speeds. I tested my own F2 with a shutter tester and sure enough, 1/1000 was actually 1/750. The note claimed this was intentional to make the camera sound faster on paper. Has anyone else run into this kind of factory fudging on older mechanical shutters?

3 comments

3 Comments

blair_davis1mo agoMost Upvoted

That 1/1000 actually being 1/750 hits me hard. I've got an old F2 sitting on my shelf that I use maybe once a year, and now I'm wondering if any of my exposures from the 90s were off. Back when I was shooting slide film, I would have killed for that kind of info. I remember a buddy of mine swearing his Pentax Spotmatic's 1/500 was way slower than his Canon's, and we just chalked it up to bad calibration from age. Wild to think it might have been baked in from the factory.

ruby5611mo ago

Grab an old roll of film or a digital camera with known accurate speeds and shoot a few frames with your F2 at each setting to compare. @blair_davis I took a batch of my old negatives to a lab last year and found my Nikkormat's 1/1000 was actually around 1/800, so it's worth checking if you care about precise exposures. Your buddy's Spotmatic issue could have been a sticky shutter curtain too, calibration slips happen on any camera over decades.

haydenp951mo ago

Wild how we spent years blaming ourselves for bad exposures when the cameras were just lying to us the whole time. Glad I never got real serious about slide film back then or I'd probably still be finding slightly off frames from 1995 and getting mad all over again.