Found out my vintage Nikon F2 shutter was off by 1/125th of a second... for 40 years

I was cleaning a customer's F2 and decided to check it against my $30 shutter tester from eBay. Turns out the factory spec from 1971 was actually 1/1000, not 1/1000th like everyone assumes because of rounding on the dial. Has anyone else caught a camera that was just slightly off from the manual for decades?

3 comments

3 Comments

emery_black24d agoMost Upvoted

Heard a buddy found his Hasselblad was shooting at 1/480 instead of 1/500 for thirty years.

river_allen23d ago

@emery_black's buddy should sue Hasselblad for those missing 20 microseconds.

carr.lee23d ago

Actually those factory specs had a tolerance for a reason, mechanical shutters drift and a 1/8th stop difference is basically nothing in real shooting. Your cheap tester probably isn't calibrated to the same standards as Nikon's 1970s equipment either, so you're comparing apples to oranges. Unless you're shooting test charts all day, that camera has been taking perfectly good pictures for four decades without anyone noticing.