Nikon f6 release date professional#
The Nikon F2 continued what the F had started, becoming standard issue for professional photographers for the most of the 1970s. By 1962 Nikon’s lens range extended from 21 mm to 1000 mm, and the F-mount would go on to support one of the largest collection of optical lenses ever created.
This provided a choice of lenses and accessories far beyond what had been available previously with rangefinders.
Nikon f6 release date pro#
Strong industrial design has always been a feature of Nikon’s pro SLRs – the lead designer of the Nikon F was Yusaku Kamekura, a leading figure in post-World War II Japanese graphic design, whose work included the 1967 Summer Olympics logo.Īt its launch, the Nikon F introduced a comprehensive professional system. The rest of the camera was virtually identical to the SP/S3 rangefinder. In the original prototype Nikon F cameras, only the mirror box, pentaprism, and bayonet mount were new. Hence the need for an SLR camera, and the Nikon F was born. The SP and S3 rangefinders required the addition of an optional reflex housing for telephoto lenses with focal lengths of 135mm or greater. The Nikon F evolved from Nikon’s rangefinder cameras, the first of which was introduced in 1947. It was not the first SLR, but is often thought to be as it brought the innovations and features of earlier models into a single body. The F had a huge impact on the camera market, introducing the era of the professional SLR at the expense of Leica and Zeiss rangefinders. The F6 evolved from the legendary Nikon F, introduced in 1959.
Evolution of the Nikon F Mount Pro SLRsĪs its name suggests, the F6 is the sixth of Nikon’s F mount pro bodies. Happily, film sales have been growing modestly since then, with film specialists like Analogue Wonderland now selling over 200 types of film stocks. Film sales were already in decline by 2004 but post-peak demand was still impressive.Īccording to the same source, by 2017 film sales had dropped to a low point of 2% of that peak before rebounding. “The film market peaked in 2003 with 960 million rolls of film” he said. Roll forward to another trade show – CES 2017 and the president of Fujifilm’s North American imaging division provided a clue as to why Nikon launched the F6 in 2004. In the same year the Minolta Dimage A1 became the first digital camera to stabilise images by shifting the sensor. In 2002 Contax shipped the first full-frame DSLR, which was followed by Canon’s popular version, the EOS-1Ds. By 1999, five years before the F6 appeared, the first fully integrated digital SLR designed from the ground up, The Nikon D1, had been launched. The LCD screens on the back of digital cameras we take for granted arrived in 1995. The world’s first digital SLR, The Kodak Professional Digital Camera System, had been introduced 13 years previously in 1991. Perhaps what caught those people out was how far digital photography had already come by 2004. As Thom Hogan observed at the time, the launch of a new pro SLR surprised a few people, but it really shouldn’t have Nikon delivered the F6 eight years after the F5, which was the standard interval between pro film bodies at that time. The Nikon F6 was announced at Photokina 2004, along with the digital Nikon D2X.