Click image to zoom

Click image to zoom

The 1965 Nikkormat FT was Nikon's second attempt at a less-expensive body that could take F lenses; the first was the 1962 Nikkorex F.

The Nikkormat FT was priced at $270 with an f2 lens, which was around $70 less than a Nikon F with the same lens. (Today $70 doesn't seem like much, but it was equivalent to about $480 in 2009 dollars.) Interestingly, the FT had mirror lock-up, which meant that it really could take all the Nikkor lenses, even the fisheye whose rear element extended into the mirror's path. This was important if it was to serve as a second body to a Nikon F.

The "T" in FT stood for TTL, or through-the-lens, just as it did in Photomic T, the TTL finder for the Nikon F. (See review, below.)

In 1967 Nikon updated the FT with the FTN, which improved the metering with center-weighting and made it a bit easier to tell the camera what the lens's smallest and largest apertures were. (After mounting the lens, you twisted the aperture ring to its extremes; the FT used a more awkward method.)

You can easily distinguish an FTN by the N that appears on the top:

The FTN was hugely successful: Over a million were sold in nine years before it was replaced by the FT2. The Nikkormat name was retired in 1977; after that all the Nikons were just called Nikon.

I haven't shot yet with my FT or FTN, but they seem really well built and very solid. And they take those Nikkor lenses.

The Photomic T finder for the Nikon F and the Nikkormat FT came out around the same time, with the same metering technology, so Popular Photography reviewed them together in its January 1966 issue:

Here's an ad for the Nikkormat FT that appeared in the December 1965 issue of Modern Photography (I don't have an FTN ad yet):

Click image to zoom

There's a nice article on the FTN on the CameraQuest site.