The Nikon 35Ti is a high end compact 35mm analogue camera released in 1993. Let’s have a closer look!
Disclosure
A reader sent me this camera so that I could have a look at it for a few weeks. Thanks a lot!
Handling
I know this camera has a lot of fans, if you are one of those, I recommend to jump to the image quality section and skip this part.
I can’t say I am a big fan of the handling of this camera and there are actually several things that got in the way.
Let’s start with the finder. It has a lot of barrel distortion which makes framing pretty hard. The framelines are often invisible indoors because they are lit from the top (not the front as all the other rangefinder cameras). It also only shows the shutter speed and whether you accidentally activated the stupid panorama mode. I would have wished to also see the aperture value and/or the EV compensation here.
If you want to know about those things, you need to resort to the top display. I am sure there are some analogue HiFi enthusiasts who will absolutely love this – personally, I greatly prefer cars with analogue instruments, too – but here I found it very cumbersome to read and use this cluttered thing. I guess you may get used to it after years of usage though.
You may wonder about that “Panorama” slider you see above. The camera can crop your 36x24mm frame to a 36x13mm “panoramic” frame. This is about the most stupid thing I have seen in an analogue camera yet. It is also possible to accidentally flick that switch when taking the camera out of the bag or a pocket, maybe that is the reason this is one of the few things the finder actually tells you about.
The lens retracts when not in use and will be automatically covered which is also something which does sound cool on paper, but in the field I found the whirring sound everytime I turned the camera on or off rather annoying. Compared to other compact film cameras I also have the feeling this made the body a bit thicker than would otherwise be necessary.
In aperture priority and program mode the shutter speed range is limited from 2s to 1/500s. I already find the 1/1000s of my Leica M6 rather limiting, so this wasn’t a positive surprise.
I actually used this camera mainly in program mode – which is something I never did with any of my cameras – but setting the aperture via that display on top was so inconvenient, I gave up on that quickly.
Autofocus
In short: noisy, slow and somewhat upredictable.
Some of these scenes should be really easy to manage even for less sophisticated AF systems, yet in many cases the AF was just completely off inexplicably.
The last sample is my personal highlight: if I had tried to focus on the stairs in the background, I don’t think I could have convinced the AF system of any of my other camers to focus there, yet the 35 Ti somehow managed.
Image Quality
Here comes the good part: the 35mm 2.8 lens is actually really good. Across frame sharpness is great and also f/2.8 hardly leaves something to be desired.
For a compact and not very fast 35mm lens the bokeh is also surprisingly nice – and luckily in the sample above the camera also focused where I wanted it to 🙂
Impressions
I guess it is obvious by now that I didn’t exactly fell in love with the Nikon 35 Ti – despite its generally very good image quality.
The problem is, I also have a Minolta CLE M-mount camera. With a compact lens like the Voigtländer VM 28mm 2.8 Color-Skopar or the Voigtländer VM 40mm 1.4 Nokton it is only slightly bigger, yet it comes with all the benefits of an interchangeable lens camera.
Obviously the Minolta does not offer autofocus – and I am sure this can be a dealbreaker for many – however, I certainly had less misfocused pictures per roll with the Minolta than with this Nikon 35 Ti.
Sample pictures
Further Reading
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BastianK, thanks for the review!
Your thoughts and observations are mostly applicable to Konica Big Mini BM-201. Great camera, nice picture quality, fantastic design. Died after like 10 rolls of film. Unrepairable.
Price and repairability are the only reasons to avoid them.
A friend of mine had this one and also Contax T2 , Leica Minilux and Minolta TC-1. I remember that Contax T2 and Minolta TC-1 stood out.
I just received a Contax G1 and I wonder if Nikon was influenced by Contax? So far I really like the G1 and the 45/2 Zeiss Planar.
When was the G1 released?
1994.
Not possible, Contax G1 was released after Nikon 35Ti.
Contax T, and T2 were released before Nikon 35Ti, though.
i love these small 35mm pocket cameras. though i generally dont have the premium ones. i had a Yashica T5 which was an awesome camera. compact, with beautifully sharp images. it’s just that these camera’s are getting more and more fragile. And there’s less people able to fix them. in the case of my T5, it suddenly died and has now been relegated to a shelf decor. after that traumatic event im sticking to purely mechanical cameras🥲
I had the T4 and it also suddenly died. I took aout the lens Tessar 35 F3.5 and rehouse it and I used it on a Nex5 10 years ago. Some color smearing at the edges but very nice lens!
Apparently cropped “panorama” was somewhat popular back in the 90s. Both my Contax TVS and Canon EOS 55 have this feature. There was even a Minolta P’s (aka Riva Panorama) that takes 35mm film and *only* shoots cropped “panorama”. It’s kind of wasteful in term of film area, but offers an option to commit to panoramic format at the time of shooting. As a panoramic enthusiast who can’t afford a XPan, I have tried the “panorama” mode on TVS and EOS 55 a bit and find it a fun addition (although the image quality is pretty limited given the small film area).
small pocket cameras, oh yeah!
Minolta Hi-Matic 7sII, Olympus SP, Canon …
so great little cameras.
they were very cheap on the fleemarkets 20-25 years ago.
you wanna test?
Actually… No.
This one was enough for now 🙂
Interesting and worthwhile review. With the dearth of modern compact cameras, I think we tend to view them, and especially those that were trying to be more premium, with the proverbial “rose-colored glasses”, but your review of this one is a reminder that some were serious design misfires.
And yeah, committing to panorama and a specific crop at taking-time seems particularly senseless, especially with film, where you’re paying for the whole photosensitive area of the film and its development, and especially with a 35mm lens, which just isn’t so wide as to either benefit from or need a panoramic crop.
Personally, I think it’s the wider focal lengths (for me, 24mm and shorter on full-frame), that most need/benefit from a panoramic crop. Because that’s when perspective distortion most rears its ugly head, and where one is most likely to try to compensate by using good architectural photography technique, which includes keeping the camera level both side-to-side and front-to-back. That in turn may mean that one has included far more of an uninteresting foreground than is desirable. So yeah, lop it off — but it should be a considered decision, both as to when to do it, and precisely where.
Quick question I can’t really find an answer to: I have a punch of analoge cameras in use and I see you are from time to time finding the time to test different models from us, your vivid readers.
Where can I send a list of stuff I would be willing to send over for a couple of weeks for you to test an (hopefully) have fun with?
I’m located in Austria, so not that far far away:)
Thanks for th eoffer!
I am currently not actively looking for film cameras for a review, if that changes I will make a post about it 🙂
Danke für die schnelle Antwort. Ich halt ein Auge drauf:) lg