Nikon Mini AF600 – Shooting with a Lite Touch

These days I use my little Fuji X100V for a ‘walking around’ camera. I like my iPhone camera just fine but usually want something a little ‘better’ than the phone. If I carry the gear I use for work, it feels like work. I just like to have that nice little capture machine for the unexpected frame I might come across in my day, one I can keep at my side.

Long before digital, long before the iPhone, I had the same desire for a small ‘walking around’ camera and found the perfect solution in the original Olympus XA and its little clamshell pocketable body. I used that sweet little camera often when not working.

In January 1994 my new bride and I traveled to San Francisco and Napa on our honeymoon where the Olympus unfortunately gave up the ghost. I can’t remember now what the problem was but just that it was not going to be repairable, or at least not worth it to me at that time. Now I see the prices they’re getting and wish I’d held on to it.

I ‘had’ to have a camera of course to document our honeymoon and my new love. There were camera stores aplenty back then and I stepped into one in downtown San Francisco to planning to grab another XA. They didn’t have one. We were heading to Napa’s wine country and I didn’t want to take the time to shop around in other stores, so I bought the new Nikon Lite Touch, released 10 months earlier in March of 1993. At 108 x 62 x 32 mm it was even tinier than the XA, the ‘right size’ for my immediate needs and even offered a ‘pano’ setting.

When the salesman showed it to me I didn’t ask any questions.  I was in a hurry to get on the road to Napa and took off with it and it’s 28mm F3.5 lens.  I used it during the rest of our honeymoon. We had our 31^stanniversary this past January.

Last week I saw another photo blog’s post about the Lite Touch. Officially known as the Nikon Mini AF600QD, on release it was touted as the World’s smallest and lightest 35mm AF camera.  That was what I wanted, something to stick in my pocket.

The long story in the blog dives into detail about how the Lite Touch AF was developed and the vision and people behind it. If you’re interested you can read more about it at Nikon’s site “The Thousand and One Nights” No. 94  https://imaging.nikon.com/imaging/information/story/0094/

I continued to use the camera for a dozen years before moving into digital and setting it aside in a drawer. Just last month I pulled it out from my collection, put a new battery in it and it fired right up.

I haven’t run a roll through it yet but hope to soon. Honestly for what I wanted it for even the X100v isn’t as compact and easy as that Lite Touch AF from 1994. How often do you read about a camera that supposedly fits in your pocket. Unless you’re wearing a clown coat most of them really don’t. This one does.

The photos here are from older scans done some years ago.  The original slides are buried in my files.

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