While its not quite the direction I had hoped to go with my next film camera (I had been hoping to find something inexpensive and medium-format and more elitist than a Holga), I picked up a used Nikon N6006 last week. And that makes sense, since I do have a few Nikon lenses that I've purchased for my digital camera. I was really excited to finally be able meter in-camera with my favorite lens ever, the $30 55mm f3.5 Micro AI. My D40 takes great pictures, but a lot of important features (for me, at least) are missing - the ability to meter with old manual focus lenses, and the ability to auto-focus on older, non AF-S lenses being two of the biggest. The N6006, despite being almost 20 years old now, can do both of these. I picked the camera up from a local dealer for about $50, which seems to be a fair price for the body.

First thing I did was popped that old macro lens on. Wow! Metering! What a breath of fresh air. It seems silly that I'm impressed by this, but after spending so much time trying to do guess-and-check metering with this awesome lens, I feel like I just acquired the most advanced camera ever. Excellent. Next, I tried swapping on one of my newer AF-S zoom lenses. This did not work so well, unfortuantely. My lenses are all of the "G" variety, which means that they're missing the aperture ring - on these, aperture is controlled from the camera. Program and Shutter-priority modes give an "Fee" reading on the LCD, which I assumed to mean that those modes won't work*. Switching over to aperture-priority appeared to display the current f-stop fine, however, so I assumed that was the way to go. I couldn't find a way to change this from the camera, so I also assumed that it only supports the maximum*. Which is fine, since that's what I use most of the time anyway.

* I was wrong about this

I picked up a cheap 4-pack of Kodak Gold 200 from Walgreens (I'll try something better later), and loaded the first roll. I took a bunch of photos with the 55m Micro and my 55-200m VR, got the negatives developed and scanned to photo CD. The photos taken with the 55m all looked great, but everything with from the VR looked horribly underexposed (I'm still getting used to the whole "better to overexpose" rule with film, as opposed to the opposite being true with digital). Here's a sample:
Underexposed N6006 VR photo
I focused on the man crossing the street, but as you can see, the entire photo looks sharp. The LCD aperture reading always showed the maximum aperture for that particular zoom level, but as the photo suggests, the lens must have been set to a smaller aperture. Because of this, the meter calculations were way off. Even though it was a bright and sunny day, the camera's calculated shutter speed for the large aperture still didn't expose long enough for the smaller opening on the lens. I'll bet that I could probably use a different camera to set the aperture, and then move the lens over and use manual mode to meter correctly. But that would be the most annoying and ghetto thing ever.

Now, I have learned to never trust anything that Ken Rockwell says, but he does have a useful Nikon Lens Compatibility guide that appears to be correct. The tables confirm my findings, stating that only P and S modes work with the newer Nikon "G" lenses. It appears that the camera won't allow you to set aperture manually (I'm assuming it just wasn't designed with the G anti-feature in mind), but it can handle it automatically. Makes sense, since I think some lenses allow you to set it from either the aperture ring or from the camera's controls, and with aperture-priority, you're supposed to set it yourself (and maybe this camera only supports using the aperture ring).

Overall, I like the camera despite the quirks. I guess I'll just have to get some more old-school auto-focus lenses. And then upgrade my digital body, so I can use those on both!