The Nikon F80 and the Loss of Human Touch in Design

The Nikon F80 is a plastic body film camera first released in February 2000 that was meant to give amateur photographers an affordable alternative to Nikon’s then more-professional-grade Nikon F100 camera. What the F80 lacks in the F100’s rugged build quality and durability, it makes up for by having many of the same features, like autofocus, at a fraction of the cost. It’s also a time capsule to an age of considerate mechanical design, something that’s all but gone in today’s capitalist hellscape.

The F80 is the second Nikon camera I own. Years ago I inherited a Nikon F2 which is a professional camera introduced in 1971 that was marketed to serious photojournalists and studio photographers but nowadays costs about $200 online. Among the online camera influencer crowd Nikon has a somewhat bad reputation for reasons that are not fully well known to me. But what I do know is the F2 can easily produce the old-school vintage look photos that a lot of influencers are paying top-dollar for these days.

The one thing I do not enjoy about the F2 is that its all-metal construction means it’s heavy as hell. At 835g, the camera weighs close to two pounds and carrying it around my neck or in a bag all day literally feels like I’m lugging around a brick. I needed something lighter and because I’ve already bought into the Nikon brand I decided to look into getting another Nikon camera, maybe one that’s a bit newer too so I have access to features like autofocus. This is how I ended up with the Nikon F80.

I bought my F80 on eBay for about $80 which is a little more expensive than other ones you can find online, but I justified the extra cost because this listing came with a lens and an MB-16 battery grip. The grip adds a lot of extra bulk to the camera, but in exchange lets you power the F80 with four AA batteries, because without the grip you need two V CR123A batteries instead. While that makes the MB-16 battery grip useful, it unfortunately adds some unwanted bulk to a camera I purchased specifically because I wanted something lighter than the Nikon F2.

So when the camera arrived, I detached the MB-16 grip from the F80 hoping to use the camera as it was originally designed. It was then I encountered a small issue. In order to use the MB-16 grip, you have to fully remove the battery cover from the F80’s body, and having bought this camera on eBay I realized the original owner never sent me the battery cover with the camera. So I wouldn’t be able to use the F80 in its original state as it has no battery cover to keep the CR123A batteries in place.

Looking online, I found a replacement battery cover for sale, but at $60 it felt like I was adding unnecessary cost to what should’ve been a cheap camera. So I decided to let it go and keep shooting the F80 with the battery grip and the added mass.

Fast-forward a couple months later, and I took the F80 out to Little Tokyo in Los Angeles one day. While shooting around the neighborhood I was again bothered by the unnecessary bulk of the F80. Tormented by my desire for a small analogue camera, I went home to see if I could find another replacement battery lid online and I figured if I could find one for $40 I might buy one.

Again, I detached the MB-16 battery grip so I could confirm the shape of the missing battery lid but only this time I noticed something strange…

On the MB-16 there is also a small battery lid identical in shape and size to the battery lid for the F80 camera body, which makes no sense because the grip doesn’t require batteries to work. I realized that the battery lid on the MB-16 wasn’t for the grip at all. It’s a dedicated spot for F80 owners to tuck away the original F80 battery lid so as to not lose it. After all, the F80 battery lid needs to be removed completely in order to make the camera compatible with the battery grip and the designers at Nikon realized that such a small piece of plastic is easy to misplace. So what did they do? They designed a little cutout for owners to keep their battery lid secure and accounted for.

A flood of joy and excitement came over me. Not only did I not need to buy an expensive replacement battery cover, but it’s such a clever little idea that even just encountering it filled me with the kind of giddyness gearheads feel around well-designed hardware.

And after the happiness wore off I began to feel something else: annoyance, maybe even a little anger. Not at Nikon, but at the state of the world. The words, “We used to be a proper country,” began ringing in my ears.

The Nikon F80 and the accompanying MB-16 battery grip requires the user to remove a small,  but important, piece of plastic, and rather than leaving the fate of this plastic bit to the user, Nikon thoughtfully constructed a small solution into the device itself. Today’s gadgets are not like the Nikon F80. Instead of being designed to account for even the smallest user annoyance, they’re vehicles to sell unwanted features and subscriptions. Consider Tesla and the way it bills car owners $13 a month to charge their cars faster. Today’s technology is downright hostile compared to a camera from the year 2000 which thought about the user experience in a way that feels almost benevolent in the year 2025.

I could cry over this battery lid cutout because in this moment I felt the considerations of some far off, probably retired, camera designer thinking of me, specifically. About a problem I might have with their camera and the small thing they could do to help me overcome it. A hand reaches out across time to deliver me a missing battery lid I thought I lost.

What are today’s designers thinking of? Certainly not me. Likely some new way to get me to buy bluetooth earbuds for a phone that no longer supports wired headphones, or a way to sign me up for an AI service that will create an animated Ghibli style avatar of my face for a social media service I don’t use anymore. Any thoughts for my battery lid? A piece of myself I could lose? We used to be a country. A proper country.

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Matthew Kim is a journalist and editor with over a decade of experience covering videogames and entertainment. In his spare time he’s a hobbyist photographer who spends too much time trying to figure out why some of his shots still come out looking blurry. You can find him on Bluesky at ?@lawoftd.bsky.social? or check out his other work at mattkimwrites.com