There’s so many used and seemingly indestructible film cameras floating around. I guess there’s some market for a factory-warranty film SLR, but I’m not sure what said market is. If I was going to shoot film, I’d find a Nikon F5, which would also double as a medieval flail for self-defense.
(Or I’d pull my 1983 Pentax off the shelf.)
Most people don’t need it but it’s certainly unique. If you do need it, there is no substitute.
Nikon actually has a history of doing that as well. The Nikonos series underwater cameras were really the only thing in their class, with unique water-contact optics that avoided rainbow diffraction from the port by putting the optics right against the water. They also made unique 180-degree orthographic lenses for atmospheric surveying - measure cloud cover/etc by photographing the sky every day and get the full horizon to horizon in one frame. etc etc. They really are a fascinating company.
Check out the 1001 Nights of Nikkor, a fascinating series of stories about all that stuff.
Medium and large format can get more because it's more film area, albeit not as much as you think in practice. It takes specific equipment and good technique, and often you are limited by the shallower depth of field or diffraction. IMO however it is much easier to achieve "reasonable" results comparable with modern full frame digital on MF/LF, because you don't need everything to be insanely high-resolution and perfectly aligned, the larger film area means that you can get good resolution out of "basic" equipment that is doing 2000-3000 dpi compared to the 4000 dpi of a drum scan that is necessary to max out 35mm.
Film also has very different technical characteristics from digital. It has an exponential "shoulder" to the exposure curve that tends to make it resistant to over-exposure, where with digital if it's overexposed it's just gone, clipped to white. It also has very different aesthetics, it just looks different (because each film stock has different exposure characteristics).
Also, some film stocks have unique frequency response curves - the astrophotography community is mourning the loss of Technical Pan film because it was perfect for photographing the hydrogen-alpha emissions of stars. It turns out that this film was developed for the National Reconnaissance Office for satellite surveillance and since they've moved to digital it's no longer being produced.
Wait; how does that work ? Where is the camera writing the info and how do you retrieve it ?
Personally I think that's a little clunky and it would be better to go with a little transflash card, but the F6 was designed in 2004 and I guess at that point it would have been a SD card and maybe even compactflash and they didn't want the size.
This approach is probably still preferable to direct USB connection though, because presumably that would require utility software that would now be incredibly out of date and tied to like Windows XP or something. If nobody bothered to write an open-source utility then that function would be unusable for modern PCs.
That's a problem on some hardware, I have a scanner where the only software that supports it is tied to Windows XP, or you can use third-party software (VueScan)_that talks to it directly and bypasses the official drivers. It is a scanner designed to do 4x5 film directly (not a flatbed) so replacements are thousands of dollars.
The F6 was the flagship 35mm SLR camera once production of new film cameras stopped at Nikon, and as such it's filled with all the features you'd expect of a flagship camera. It'll take a battery grip, it shoots at 8FPS with it, it'll take a separate data recorder to record exposure info, etc. etc.
Except that a lot of people using film today don't want that. The manual old-time simplicity and thoughtfulness is part of the selling point for a lot of those who still use film, and if they wanted to shoot at 8FPS or higher, DSLRs and mirrorless cameras are far better choices on any technical merit. I'd be surprised if the F6 ends up selling out easily.
I heard a couple of years back that Japanese police bought F6s for evidence photography.
There is also a market of camera users who just want the "best", newest thing, with the most features. Look at the difference in prices between the Nikon FE or FM and FM3A, when they are barely different for a photographer with even modest skills
/edit or the Nikon F6 and F100
