Glass Bodies a variant-level encyclopedia of vintage lenses and cameras by iwillpat

Nikkormat EL

Nippon Kogaku · Nikon F mount · 24×36mm on 35mm film, hinged back · 1972

Also known as: Nikomat EL · Nikkormat E.L. · ニコマートEL

Variants & identification

Variant Mount Years Serial ranges Production
Nikkormat EL Nikon F 1972–1976 — No figure published
  1. No production figure has been published. A claim that 500,000 were built over five years circulates on collector blogs; John Margetts, repeating it at oldcamera.blog, attributes it only to "the Interweb" and uses it to date his own camera, so it should not be treated as a figure at all.
  2. No serial-date table has been published. The same source records a body numbered 5208996 and reports, again without attribution, that Nikkormat serials begin at 5000000.
  3. Sold in two finishes, chrome-and-black and all black. Neither is a variant.
  4. The EL had a reputation for eating batteries, which is why the advance lever doubles as the power switch: Nikon's own account explains that an electronically controlled body draws milliamps whatever the light, and would flatten a cell in days if left on. Richard Haw, who strips these cameras for a living, adds that the 4SR44 is now hard to find and goes flat quickly, and that the 1/90 mechanical speed is what is left when it does.
  5. Common faults, from Richard Haw's teardown: the meter needle jams for no obvious reason, the light seals rot, and the mirror-box battery chamber corrodes. He rates the EL tough — fewer parts than an F, so less to go wrong — but will not recommend a beginner open one, and says every Nikkormat finder is painful to clean because so much has to come off first.
  6. The screen fitted is not consistent across surviving cameras: Clive Williams reports a microprism-only screen in his and regrets the absence of a split-image, while Jim Grey describes a split-image with a microprism collar in his. Both are consistent with Nikon's statement that more than one screen was in production and the choice was made at purchase.
How to tell them apart (expand)
  • Shutter speed dial on the top plate, unlike the mechanical Nikkormats
  • A wide unmarked gap between B and 4 on that dial, which sets an 8-second exposure Nikon deleted from the engraving but left in the circuit
  • Rabbit-ear prong coupling: the aperture ring must be twisted to both stops after mounting to index the lens
  • Pentaprism housing shaped around a horseshoe of printed circuit board laid over the prism
  • Match-needle readout with a black needle for the metered speed and a translucent green needle for the set speed

Nikkormat EL:

  • Shutter speed dial on the top plate — the EL series moved it there, while the mechanical Nikkormats kept the ring around the mount
  • Battery hatch inside the mirror box: the lens comes off and the mirror goes up before it can be reached

Specifications

Format
24×36mm on 35mm film, hinged back
Finder
Fixed pentaprism, non-interchangeable; fixed screen, supplied with either a microprism (Type J) or a split-image (Type A) centre, both with a 12mm circle marking the meter's centre weighting · no rangefinder image
Shutter
Copal Square SE, metal blade, vertical travel, focal plane, electronically timed · 4s – 1/1000 stepless on automatic; B and 1s – 1/1000 set manually; 1/90 mechanically with a dead battery. An unmarked 8s position sits between B and 4 · flash sync X at 1/125 · self-timer
Film advance
single-stroke lever, which switches the meter and shutter on when swung out to about 30°
Back
hinged
Meter
TTL 60/40 centre-weighted CdS, match-needle, film speed set from ISO 25 to 1600, driven by one 6V cell (4G13, now 4SR44 or PX28) housed in the mirror box
Motor drive
Not compatible — None. Nikon says automatic film advance had been in the EL's project plan from the start, but the coupling was not fitted until the ELW of 1976.
Weight
780 g
Dimensions
145 × 93.5 × 54.5 (width × height × depth) mm
Country
Japan
Accessories
Type J microprism and Type A split-image focusing screens (fitted, not user-changeable)

What reviewers say

History

The problem the Nikomat EL solved took eight years. Automatic exposure on a leaf-shutter camera was routine by the mid-1960s, and Nippon Kogaku had already built one — the Nikon Auto 35 of 1964. On a single-lens reflex with a focal-plane shutter it was much harder, because the through-the-lens meter goes blind at precisely the moment the shutter needs its reading: the mirror rises, the light is cut off, and only then does the exposure begin. The answer was to memorise the reading in a capacitor and let the stored voltage time the shutter, and Nikon’s own account of the period says the patent fights over how to do that were fierce. The first prototype, a compact-looking thing called 5B built around an electronic version of the Copal Square shutter, was finished in 1969. Its control circuit used logarithmic compression, which looked like someone else’s patent, and had to be rebuilt around a bi-logarithmic scheme before the camera could ship.

What shipped at the end of 1972 has its electronics in a place no designer would choose. The integrated circuit — 74 transistors and 27 resistors on a two-millimetre square — was still too big to sit under the shutter dial with the galvanometer, so the top cover was reshaped and a horseshoe of printed circuit board was laid over the pentaprism. The battery went somewhere worse. A 6.2-volt silver cell was needed, and the shutter-charging rack runs across the bottom of the body, so the battery hatch ended up inside the mirror box: the lens comes off, the mirror is flipped up, and the cover is down there. Nikon’s historian describes finding it as a puzzle and notes, in mitigation, that Zeiss Ikon had done the same thing on the Contarex.

The camera also has a shutter speed it does not admit to. The dial is marked to 4 seconds, but there is a wide gap between B and 4, and setting the dial into that gap gives 8 seconds. The specification had allowed for it; late in development the controlling capacitor turned out not to hold its charge reliably that long under some conditions, so the engraving was deleted and the resistor was left in place. It works. Whether it works accurately, Nikon declined to say.

Externally the EL broke with the mechanical Nikkormats in one visible way: the shutter speed dial went to the top plate, where the rest of the industry kept it, instead of the ring around the lens mount that the FT and FTN had used since 1965. Everything else stayed Nikkormat — 780 grams of aluminium casting with brass plates, a fixed prism, a fixed screen, no motor drive, and the rabbit-ear prong that had to be twisted to both stops after mounting before the meter knew the lens.

The record on how many were made is empty. No figure has been published by Nikon or by anyone with access to Nikon’s records; a round 500,000 circulates on collector sites attributed to nothing more than the internet, and the serial blocks that would test it have never been tabulated for any Nikkormat. Roland Vink’s database, which does exactly this work for Nikkor lenses, has not reached the manual-focus bodies. Until it does, the commercial size of Nippon Kogaku’s first electronic camera is a guess.

Expand Collapse

This history is AI-written, from the sources listed at the foot of the page. Where the record is silent it says so rather than filling the gap — but no human wrote these sentences.

Photographs

Nikkormat EL
Nikkormat EL — Dolapeart, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Nikkormat EL
Nikkormat EL, black — Shieldforyoureyes Dave Fischer, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Live listings

Asking price, USD: a median of $80 across 38 fixed-price listings on 2026-10-19 (middle half $50–$110). Tracked since 2026-09-06, 9 days: unchanged from $80.

By day
DateMedianMiddle halfListings
2026-10-19$80$50–$11038
2026-10-18$80$50–$12039
2026-10-17$80$50–$12039
2026-10-16$80$40–$13036
2026-10-15$80$49–$13036
2026-09-21$89$50–$14037
2026-09-18$89$50–$14041
2026-09-11$80$41–$14044
2026-09-06$80$41–$14044

Asking prices from the listings scanned, not sales; junk-flagged rows and auction lots excluded; other currencies are not converted.

Show 81 more listings

Listings updated 2026-10-19. Links go to the shop or marketplace that carries the item.

Related: Nikkormat ELW · Nikon EL2

Sources (8)

Every page here is assembled from public sources, and the gaps are real ones. If you own this camera, know a serial number I'm missing, or can see where I have it wrong, tell me — corrections, serials and sample photos are all worth having.