The Nikon FE2 has been in the limelight recently, due to its prominent inclusion in the movie Civil War, where it’s the camera of choice for a young, aspiring war photographer amidst a fictional uprising in the USA. It seems likely that the SLR’s inclusion is a nod to one of the greatest photojournalists and Nikon photographers of all time, Don McCullin, whose older Nikon F2 famously stopped a bullet.
A STEP FORWARDS AND BACK...
The FE2 was released by, then, Nippon Kogaku in 1983 as the follow up to 1978’s FE. It launched six months before the pioneering Nikon FA introduced matrix metering which – according to Nikon USA – was originally intended to be the Nikon FE2. However, the FA’s advanced spec exceeded the FE2’s intended price range, and so a more humble alternative was born. While the FE2 wasn’t as advanced as the FA, it was still a marked improvement over the FE, thanks to its 1/250 sec flash sync speed (a world first), TTL metering and 1/4000 sec max shutter speed – inherited from the mighty FM2. Like the FE, it featured both manual and aperture priority exposure modes, and could shoot long exposures down to eight seconds. The camera was discontinued in 1987.