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

Nikon FE2

Nippon Kogaku · Nikon F mount · 24×36mm on 35mm film, hinged back · 1983

Also known as: Nikon FE-2 · Nippon Kogaku Nikon FE2 · ニコンFE2

Variants & identification

Variant Mount Years Serial ranges Production
Nikon FE2 Nikon F 1983–1987 — No figure published
  1. No production figure has been published for the FE2, by Nikon or by anyone else. The camera ran four years in two finishes and left no number behind.
  2. The FE2 and the FA were on sale against each other from September 1983: two Nikons of the same size, both with a 1/4000 shutter and a 1/250 sync, one of them $200 dearer and metering in five segments.
  3. The FE2's titanium shutter is not quite the FM2's. James Tocchio at Casual Photophile records eight blades against the FM2's nine and a curtain travel time of 3.3 milliseconds against 3.6, the electronic timing coming from a quartz oscillator rather than a mechanical escapement.
  4. Two review sources put the end of the FE2 in different years. This entry runs the camera to 1987; Casual Photophile writes that it "was available from dealers until 1989", which describes retail stock rather than manufacture. The two are not necessarily in conflict, and no source examined states a manufacturing end date.
How to tell them apart (expand)
  • A 1/250 flash sync at a time when most competitors managed 1/60 or 1/90
  • Aperture-priority automation and manual only — no program, no shutter priority
  • Interchangeable focusing screens, changed through the lens mount

Nikon FE2:

  • Shutter dial reading to 4000 — the giveaway against an FE, which stops at 1000
  • M250 and B on the dial: the two speeds that fire with dead batteries
  • The aperture-indexing prong does not fold, so a pre-AI Nikkor will not go on

Serial-range notes

no published list
No serial-number list for the FE2 has been published by Nikon or assembled by a collector site of the standing of Richard de Stoutz's F and F2 tables. Starting numbers circulate on forums; none of them is sourced, and none is recorded here.

Specifications

Format
24×36mm on 35mm film, hinged back
Finder
Fixed eye-level pentaprism, interchangeable focusing screens (K2, B2, E2) · 0.86× magnification · 93% coverage · no rangefinder image
Shutter
Titanium, vertical travel, focal plane; electronically timed with a mechanical fallback · 8s – 1/4000 in automatic, 1s – 1/4000 set manually, plus M250 (mechanical 1/250) and B · flash sync 1/250 · self-timer
Film advance
Single-stroke lever
Back
Hinged; interchangeable for the MF-12 and MF-16 data backs
Meter
Through-the-lens centre-weighted metering, 60/40, from a silicon photodiode; EV 1 to EV 18 at ISO 100 with a 50mm f/1.4. Off-the-film TTL flash metering with the dedicated Speedlights, and a ready light in the finder.
Motor drive
MD-12, MD-11 — The MD-12 advances at up to 3.2 frames a second.
Weight
550 g
Dimensions
142.5 × 90 × 57.5 mm
Country
Japan
Original price
$446 for the chrome body alone in the United States (today $1,400)
Accessories
Motor Drive MD-12 · Motor Drive MD-11 · Data Back MF-12 · Data Back MF-16 · Focusing screens K2, B2 and E2 · Speedlight SB-15, SB-16

A match-needle display: the meter needle rides a shutter-speed scale down the left of the frame, with a second needle showing the speed the camera has chosen.

What reviewers say

History

The Nikon FE2 is the camera left over when a project was split. Nikon’s own Camera Chronicle tells it plainly: the successor to the FE of 1978 was to carry matrix metering and multi-mode automation, and as those functions were piled on, its cost climbed past what an FE was allowed to cost and its specification drifted away from what an FE was. So that camera was released in September 1983 as the FA, and a second, simpler successor — the FE with a 1/4000 shutter and TTL flash control added, and little else touched — was designed and released six months earlier as the FE2.

The shutter is the whole of the difference. Nikon had spent from the end of 1977 on a high-speed shutter team whose result was the FM2 of 1982, with titanium blades made by a honeycomb-pattern etching method; the FE2 takes that shutter converted to electronic timing. The top speed is 1/4000 and the flash synchronises at 1/250, which in 1983 was a specification for professional bodies rather than for the model below the F3. Automatic exposures run to eight seconds. Without batteries the camera still fires at a mechanical 1/250, marked M250, and on B.

Something was given up for it. The FE could meter a pre-1977 Nikkor because its indexing coupling folded out of the way; the FE2’s does not, so lenses that have not been converted to automatic indexing cannot be mounted. A camera built on a mount whose selling point is that nothing is ever obsolete had, in this one respect, drawn a line across the catalogue.

The other addition was flash. A silicon photodiode reads the light reflected off the film during the exposure and quenches the dedicated Speedlight, with a ready light in the finder — the same off-the-film system the FG had introduced the year before, now behind a 1/250 sync.

What the record does not contain is any figure. No production total for the FE2 has been published by Nikon or by anyone else, and no serial-number list of the kind that exists for the F and the F2 has been assembled for it. Starting numbers circulate on forums without a source and are not recorded here. The United States list price for a chrome body was $446. Two finishes were sold, chrome-topped and all-black, and camera-wiki records no other version — no commemorative edition, no titanium body, nothing of the sort the FA received within a year of its release.

That leaves the FE2 documented in specification and undocumented in quantity. The month of release rests on Nikon’s own phrase, six months before the FA, rather than on a dated announcement; how many were built, in what serial blocks, and in what proportion of black to chrome are all open.

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

Nikon FE2
Nikon FE2 with the Series E 50mm — Bertrand Labévue, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Nikon FE2
Nikon FE2, black, with the Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 — Paul Chin, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Nikon FE2
Nikon FE2, top plate — Steve Bowbrick, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5)

Live listings

Asking price, USD: a median of $330 across 58 fixed-price listings on 2026-10-19 (middle half $280–$400). Tracked since 2026-09-06, 9 days: down 3% from $340.

By day
DateMedianMiddle halfListings
2026-10-19$330$280–$40058
2026-10-18$330$280–$40058
2026-10-17$330$280–$40058
2026-10-16$330$290–$40057
2026-10-15$330$280–$40056
2026-09-21$300$250–$38047
2026-09-18$300$250–$37051
2026-09-11$340$280–$43045
2026-09-06$340$280–$43045

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

Show 100 more listings

Buying from Yahoo! Auctions outside Japan. It is a domestic marketplace: sellers ship within Japan, and most will not register an overseas buyer. A proxy service bids on your behalf, receives the item and forwards it, for a fee and a wait. Buyee, Jauce and ZenMarket each accept a Yahoo auction number directly. Listed alphabetically for information — none is recommended over another, and none of these is an affiliate link.

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

Related: Nikon FA

Lenses for this body: Micro-Nikkor 55mm f/2.8 · Nikkor 20mm f/2.8 · Nikkor 24mm f/2 · Nikkor 28mm f/2

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.