The problem with these dang cameras are the lenses. The majority of them have a fatal flaw, a tiny little plastic gear that breaks and then the aperture stops functioning. Something like 90% of all the lenses have the same flaw which is why you can find them on fleabay in broken condition. I have had one on my workbench for like a year that I've been meaning to fix that I got for dirt cheap and I just haven't gotten to it because it is such a pain in the butt to replace that gear. You can get a metal replacement gear it is rather costly though and the places that will still do the repair with the metal gear are all in Japan and are not worth it cost wise. The later pancake kit lens is not susceptible to the failure, so that's nice at least. I gifted a J5 to my dad a few years back and both of the lenses failed. I repaired them both with the metal gears. The process involved extensive use of four letter expletives directed at the Nikon engineers and copious amounts of coffee.
That's a huge design flaw on the part of Nikon, and unfortunate. Hopefully some of the cost cutting of the era has been replaced with better practices now.
@@DavidHancock Oh yeah - they got bit bad by it - they provided warranty coverage for gears for years. I wanted to call it out here in case someone sees this and goes shopping for one. They really are a fantastic series of cameras. The last few lenses they released were far more reliable and I think Nikon learned a lot. I still don't trust the Nikon plastic fantastic lenses though. I wish they would have made the new throwback-looking lenses out of solid materials. Instead they feel super cheap, just like the low end RF glass.
@@addy7167 here's an affiliate link to one that will work very well. www.amazon.com/dp/B0B7NWR653/ref=cm_sw_r_as_gl_apa_gl_i_CVT0D4ZJVXJX422793F6?linkCode=ml2&tag=5119llc-20
