Nikon’s broad advertising was relentless but focused almost entirely on professionals. The basic view was, it seems, to sell consumer cameras because the professionals used them. The little button/lever below the chrome one on the left is the emergency manual shutter release.

By contrast, Canon used tried and true celebrity endorsement from non-photographers (mostly sports) highlighting ease of use and broad appeal.

All along Nikon was incredibly innovative with consumer cameras where they felt they could “experiment”. Nikon released dozens of models with automatic exposure, fancy metering, integrated motor drives, and eventually even auto focus in 1986. Many more consumer models than pro!

Nikon had an incredibly broad range of cameras with a large number of consumer models but their focus and business was really about professionals where they did not really expand the model lineup rapidly or broadly. The Nikon F was 1959; F2 in 1971; F3 in 1980; F4 (autofocus) 1988; and on the heels of the digital revolution the F5 in 1996.

This is from the Tokyo Olympics (I believe) in 1964. There are only Nikon cameras and notice the uniformity. By the way, the lenses with the chrome ring are an 85–250mm lens, the equivalent of today’s 80–200 professional zoom. This was introduced in 1959 and was the first commercial zoom lens from Japanese makers.

Nikon was broadly associated with photography and of course was mentioned in Simon & Garfunkel’s “Kodachrome”…”I got a Nikon camera/I love to take a photograph /So mama don’t take my Kodachrome away”. This is a gallery of 1960s and 1970s celebrities just taking pictures with Nikons.

Into the 1980s, Nikon was the only choice for professionals. This is a shot of a gallery of sports photographers (at a track of some type).

Also Nikon was very busy working with Kodak on pioneering digital cameras. All through the 1990s there were incredible advances that relied on Nikon camera bodies and optics and Kodak digital sensors.

This is an early prototype of a digital camera based on a Nikon camera body with a Kodak sensor in the camera and all the image capture and translation done in the off board box connected by cables. This one, I believe had a 1MB monochrome image and took about 30 seconds to capture. It was revolutionary in 1995 or so.

Nikon was even first to release professional digital cameras with the much anticipated Nikon D-1 in 1999.

Nikon’s D-1 pioneered the fully integrated and well-designed SLR body that is had been evolving since the F3. Nikon resisted digital broadly for products because professionals were skeptical of the quality. Digital camera sensors captured much less resolution than film at the time and there were endless arguments about compression. This is ironic because so much of photography had used film “grain” (essentially compression artifacts) as an artistic element. Professionals really resisted but this camera was revolutionary for daily news photographers (product-market fit!). I can tell lots of stories from news photog friends and my own experiences developing film in hotel rooms and closets. Crazy to think of, and they were happy to move on! To compromise, this sensor introduced the smaller frame size which meant lenses behaved with different fields of view, further confusing professionals and because frame size=quality in film it further “amateur-ized” the camera.

Canon could not win over pros. Nikon was innovating but was still all about Pros being in “control” and “conservative”, eg every lens from 1959 forward still worked on current cameras. #professional

In the photo 5 up of the press gallery with photogs in white caps, this is the lens on the left side. It was the first commercial zoom lens from November 1959 just 3 months after the F launch. Here is that lens mounted on the latest Nikon D850 introduced Fall 2017 (59 years later!)

Canon took a bold step and designed a whole new lens system around *autofocus*. It was vastly criticized by professionals and the press at the time for breaking compatibility with Canon’s existing FD mount (which itself had maintained compatibility over 3 generations of Canon lenses going back to the 1960s). This lens mount made driving autofocus much more efficient and fast and also easily supported automatic exposure known as “shutter priority” and “programmed” where Nikon on professional cameras only supported aperture priority until the F4 was released in 1988 (after Canon’s EF mount, but still compatible with the F mount) though the 1983 Nikon FA pro-sumer camera supported these automatic modes. I think we can draw some fascinating lessons from how professionals react to change from this since these patterns repeat and have repeated themselves.

This is the Canon EF (electronic focus) lens mount introduced in 1987. It broke with tradition of maintaining lens compatibility.

This was 1987! So there was still a long haul. Canon focused (ha) on consumers, ease of use, and reliability of electronics and began to win with a full range of autofocus lenses and gained expertise with consumer cameras.

They were going after Nikon from the underserved market.

By 2000’s Canon had built out a massive arsenal of both film and digital cameras.

While Nikon had invented [productized or commercialized] all the technology from electronic metering, to autofocus, to digital, Canon was going to use it all to win over professionals while Nikon was concerned about both cannibalization and just not serving professionals as well. See where this is going??

In 2000, right when Nikon released its Digital Pro SLR, Canon released one as well but had their much better autofocus lenses and all that experience, and was also willing to sacrifice “quality” for speed. Enter the Canon EOS digital line.

The Canon EOS D30 which was small and compact and not quite up to pro standards. It featured Canon’s len’s driven Auto Focus system and a wide range of EF AF lenses.

Professionals photogs, especially sports, were all about speed and saw the advantages of autofocus. Canon capitalized with an incredible range of lenses built from the start for autofocus and sports, along with these new digital bodies. Also they made their lenses white.

As no doubt everyone is familiar, this is what the sideline and courtside and gallery of every press event looks like—it is filled with these iconic white barreled Canon lenses. Originally a design statement but being Japanese it was justified with a product reason saying that white reflected sunlight and did not distort the optics (mostly nonsense).

From 1981, when Canon was developing autofocus here is a magazine article about how autofocus works. It is telling that they explain how it works from the perspective of Canon even though Nikon productized modern autofocus.