Send Don @duceditor a PM. He has a top of the line Nikon F3 that he might be willing to part with. Here's a photo he posted, with 2 F3 bodies, one on the right, and one in the middle with a motor drive attached, and what looks like the smaller and lighter but still very high quality and quite capable FE on the left. They both are manual focus and feature aperture priority or manual exposure.
Bear in mind that it's getting harder and harder to find lenses for those older manual focus cameras. I think it'll be easier to find glass for Nikon and Canon than for Minolta or Olympus (especially Olympus), and clean examples of the camera brand's lenses can be quite expensive. However, there's good glass available from third party makers like Tokina, Sigma, Vivitar, Tamron, Kiron, and Soligor, as well as less expensive off brands, some of which are still good, and some not so good.
Looking at their website lately elicits sad results. Many bodies that they list as "excellent" have dead meters or other problems. There's slim pickings there now, as there is at B&H and Adorama. The most recent 35mm gear I got came from B&H and was in mint like new condition for a very reasonable cost. That was several years ago and sadly that's no longer the case, at least judging by the last time I looked at used 35mm gear there. The best selection I see now is on Ebay, but there's the question of whether everything listed is working properly. Some older 35mm bodies need the light seals on the back replaced, because the old ones are rotted, and some lenses have fungus or sticky aperture blades.
Yes the battery may be a problem to find. I found this one which may or may not work, not sure.
I loved it, smaller and lighter than the big FA, and it handled great, and made images as great as any camera. I also liked the LED shutter speeds that lit up in red on the side of the viewfinder screen, rather than red LED dots next to the matte overlay showing shutter speed numbers, as on the X700. The FA had an LCD above the focusing screen in its viewfinder, and i actually don't remember what the FE2 had. I think it had a needle that hovered over the shutter speed selected. They all had the aperture reflected off of the lens in the viewfinder, but the X370 and N2000 don't have that.
Yes I'm on it already. I'm gonna grab these.Yes the battery may be a problem to find. I found this one which may or may not work, not sure.
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Thanks for reminding me. I should take those out of my X700 and X370. They've been in them for years. I hope they haven't leaked and damaged anything.
It still has an electric meter in it. But, as old as those are, the light sensor will be a Cds cell, not a silicon one. The SRT- 101 was the first camera with a sort of multi-pattern meter that compensated for backlighting. They called it CLC, for contrast light compensation. They were also the first with auto indexing of the lens to the meter, and one of the first with wide open metering capability. I remember the Pentax Spotmatic of the same era had to be stopped down to take a meter reading and I think the Nikon F and F2 may have needed to be stopped down too.
