>>3241785>After visiting a local camera shop the salesman recommended a D7200 and claimed that it was the only Nikon camera that would work with his old manual lenses due to its “exposure metering”Surprisingly, not entirely bullshit.
Lenses need to communicate their maximum aperture with the camera body they're attached to. The reason for this is that they take meter readings and let you focus with the aperture wide open--the meter in the camera needs to know how far this is from the aperture you've actually selected to shoot with so it can give an accurate reading.
Modern autofocus lenses communicate this information electronically. Old manual focus lenses communicated this mechanically. For Nikon lenses made after about 1977, this is done with a little widget called an "auto-indexing tab". A little cutout on the lens matches up with a little lever on the lens mount and the distance the cutout turns the lever tells the camera what the max aperture is.
Lower-end Nikons (d3x00/d5x00 series; older d40/d60 series; some other older ones) don't have the little lever that reads the aperture. So the lens can mount, and the lens will let you focus wide open, and when you take a picture, the lens will stop down to the aperture you've selected... but the camera has no way to know what the difference was between the light coming in while you were lining up the shot and the light that'll be coming in when you take the picture.
Nikon solves this dilemma by just entirely disabling the metering system. No auto modes work at all, you can't use the built-in flash, and even manual mode doesn't tell you what the lens is metering. You can use it in manual mode, but you'll have to do so using your keen knowledge of how different lighting situations should be metered or use an external meter, because the built-in meter will be out having a smoke break behind the dumpster.
Additionally, the lower-end Nikons also won't autofocus with older autofocus lenses.
