Nikon I

What killed the Nikon I was not the size of its pictures but the distance between them. Nippon Kogaku’s first camera laid a 24×32mm frame on 35mm film — the size the Japanese Ministry of Education had set for slide projectors, forty exposures to a cassette instead of thirty-six, and a 3:4 shape the company thought better proportioned than Leica’s 2:3 — and that frame advanced the film seven perforations at a time where the rest of the world used eight. American automatic colour-slide cutting machines were built for the Leica pitch. Fed a Nikon film they cut through the middle of every picture, and on that basis GHQ withheld permission to export the camera while the CPO held off its order. Sixteen months and 738 bodies after release, the Nikon I was discontinued and the unsold stock rebuilt into something else. The proof that the pitch and not the picture was the problem is the Nikon M that replaced it: it kept a non-standard 24×34mm image, moved to eight perforations, and the impediment to export was gone.

It was very nearly a twin-lens reflex. At a board meeting in October 1945 Nippon Kogaku designated a camera as the product to follow binoculars and lenses, and reassigned the engineers who had been designing mechanical computers to design it. A Camera and Projector Committee formed that November and reached its conclusions in April 1946, approving two cameras — a 6×6 on 120 film and a 35mm on the 24×32 format, with some in the room arguing for the 24×24 of the Tenax — and mock-ups of a twin-lens reflex and a small camera were shown on the company’s founding anniversary that July. The reflex died on its shutter. The Prontor-type units on the market did not meet Nippon Kogaku’s standards for durability or accuracy, and a Compur-class shutter built in house turned out to need press tools the company could not afford. So on 15 April 1946 the order went out instead to construct twenty miniature cameras as an experiment. The working name was Nikorette, from the Nikko contraction of Nippon Kogaku with a diminutive attached; the prevailing opinion was that it made a weak product name, and an N was added to Nikko instead, because it sounded better.

What those test cameras became is a Contax with a Leica’s shutter inside it. The body shape, the fully removable double-locked back and the dual bayonet — whose inner ring focuses on a helical built into the camera rather than the lens — are all Zeiss; the horizontal cloth focal-plane blind behind them is the simpler and cheaper Leica idea, in place of the Contax’s vertically travelling metal one. Nippon Kogaku put both speed dials on the top plate, concentric, the slow dial coming alive only when the fast dial is set to its 1–1/20 position, and claimed the arrangement, along with a radial bearing in the shutter, as firsts — claims that appear nowhere but in Nikon’s own history. There is no flash synchronisation of any kind, no meter and no self-timer, and no motor drive: none existed for any Nikon rangefinder until the S2. The finder is a single 0.6× eyepiece covering 85 per cent of a 50mm field with no projected framelines at all, fed by a 60mm rangefinder base: an effective baselength of 36mm, a little over half the 67.5mm Stephen Gandy publishes for the Contax II. The fastest lens made for the mount in the camera’s lifetime was f/2; the 5cm f/1.5 arrived in January 1950. Gandy rates the rangefinder image of this earliest group probably the brightest of any Nikon rangefinder. The mount copies the Contax closely enough that Zeiss wide-angles will work on it, but Contax cut its body helical for a nominal 52.3mm standard lens and Nippon Kogaku did not match the figure, so the longer the borrowed lens the worse the focus. Inside, on a photographed example, the finish is crude.

By law the camera could not be sold in Japan. The Ministry of Commerce and Industry, promoting export, assigned the whole of production abroad and did not permit domestic sales, the one exception being a special-purpose allocation in October 1948 at GHQ’s request — which made the fixed domestic list price of ¥57,690 with the NIKKOR 5cm f/2 largely theoretical. The first export was a deal with Trade Corporation for 200 sets with the 5cm f/3.5, of which fifty went to Hong Kong in October 1948; a second purchase of 110 sets followed in March 1949, bound for the United States, Europe, Hong Kong and Singapore. That destination sits awkwardly beside the collector’s account, repeated almost everywhere, that MacArthur’s administration simply barred the Nikon I from America. The reconciliation, if there is one, is that the cameras which reached American hands mostly did so through a channel that was not export at all: they were sold at PX military exchanges to the occupation forces. Output was tiny either way — fewer than 300 cameras in the whole of 1948, monthly production passing 100 in January 1949 and 200 in July.

Counting them is where the record knots. Nikon’s own chronicle says the camera was discontinued at an aggregated sum of 738; the collector literature says 758 or 759, noting that the factory records are unclear. Both are right about different things, because the serials are legible: 609 encodes September 1946, when the drawings were finished, and everything after it is a plain build sequence, so a Nikon I’s number is its place in the run. The marketed range runs 60922 to 609759, which is 738 numbers, while the test cameras below it — twenty, or twenty-one if 60921 is counted — begin at 6091, and 6091 to 609759 is 759. How many of the 738 reached a customer is harder, and every answer traces back through a different retelling to Robert Rotoloni: about 400, with roughly ninety bodies failing inspection and some 200 to 250 unsold ones rebuilt as Nikon Ms — a gate widened from 32 to 34mm, new sprockets, a new back, the castings untouched. Nikon dates the discontinuation to July 1949 and the switch to M production to August; the collector sources date the discontinuation itself to August. No published source found names a single engineer on the Nikon I, the company’s own chronicle going no further than the designers who had been engaged in the design of mechanical computers. Nor are the camera’s dimensions published, nor whether its finder makes any allowance for parallax, nor a second sighting of the single black-painted Nikon I recorded in a Japanese collection in 1981. In 2016 number 60924, third in the production sequence, carried an estimate of €160,000 to €180,000 into a Westlicht sale and made €384,000.