Nikon N70

[Niner]

Got this 1994 era Nikon for cheap lately. First thing was cleaning the sticky plastic coating off the back with contact cleaner, Isopropyl alcohol. Nikon was among the few that liked this rubbery stuff the aged badly as it turns out. A couple of CR123 batteries I had fired it up. Put in some film and pressed the shutter button and camera self loaded to 1. Then took it shooting and ..... no click. After much consternation I discovered the ISO not set automatically and for some reason the camera refused to fire... problem contributed from last user. Set ISO. Good to go. It seemed to be working and advancing the film numbers. At the end of the trip noticed I had taken 45 shots on a 36 shot roll. Turns out the camera didn't stop at the end of the roll for some reason but did blink that the end was achieved. No problem. I didn't know how to get the film to rewind. Came home to find out with a Googled up manual.

The film rewinds with pushing two different buttons at the same time. "In" and "Ps". Camera companies that were more user friendly just did the rewind after the end of the roll and you couldn't keep on thinking you had film and taking shots.

Some people are big Nikon fans. A lot of it is based on earlier days with non computer age programs and great quality lenses. But by the time this 1994 camera came out Canon had eaten Nikon's lunch for more than a decade with professionals and the mind of Minolta was way ahead too. Pentax was even ahead of Nikon.

Nikon never invested in ergonomics during the last couple of decades of the commercial film age. This was pretty obvious without doing much investigation. Why would a camera company produce cameras and lenses that were attached with counterclockwise to tighten and clockwise to loosen? They never heard of "righty tighty, lefty loosey" apparently and nothing much that their later decades did made any obvious sense.