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History of the Pro SLR


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There was some good competiton, but Nikon had the edge in the early SLR days. Probably because of the lens quality and choices. There were and still are plenty of Canon, Pentax and Minolta fans out there who will attest to the benefits of their brand. I had a pentax with some pretty good prime lenses, but I eventually picked up a used Ftn and replaced my original Pentax. Later when I reluctantly went to auto focus, I went with Canon.
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Which came first the Nikon F or the Canon F-1? I'm fairly good at searching, but I'm looking for a discussion.

 

BTW, I've had a Canon 50/1.2 and a Nikkor 50/1.4 and prefer by far the Nikkor, which I still have in Leica thread mount. Although, my first "real" camera was a Nikkormat, I have no prejudice wrt lens makers.

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Nikon-F. It was a blessing after the Nikon-S. Truly a modular professional 35mm camera.

And when it broke, a person could keep the prism, back and focusing screen and turn the

rest in for repair or throw it away.

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The first SLR to be accepted by the Pros was the Exacta, then the Nikon F-1 but not until a couple years after it was introduced since the Pros were slow to switch over from their RF's and Big Folders.

 

Ben is correct the canons of the 60 while being good camera for their day didn't peek the Pro's interest until Canon came out with the F-1 and it's complete system in 1971.

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i READ THE DURING WWII the exacta, being the only 35mm slr

was used to take photos thru periscopes ot not only geman sube but americal submarines.

this is certainly a "PRO" application

I don't know when the firsdt eye-level slr was made.

or when a prism finder was made for the exacta.

 

many of the japanese manufactures made dependable slr's

but few could be called professional cameras

with the durability and reparirability of the Nikons and pro level

Canons. others even came faitly close.

pentax never really tried hard enough to get into the pro field

although they made good cameras and lenses.

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According to Wikipedia, Contax gets credit for the first serialized SLR (there were large-format SLRs prior, dating back to the early years of the 20th century), the S released in 1949. Nikon and Canon (as well as Yashica) didn't release SLRs of their own until a decade later. Though the Nikon F is considered to be quite revolutionary, and probably the clearest forerunner to the SLR systems we have today.

 

I know that through most of the film era, the Nikon F series was considered to be the premiere pro SLR; significantly more pros shot Nikons than they did any other body. Canon remained a clear but distant second until they introduced the EOS autofocus bodies (Nikon lagged behind, believing pros would never be interested in autofocus, program modes, etc.). Nikon did catch back up in sales, but then with the coming of digital, they fell behind Canon again and haven't yet made up that ground again.

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The question actually says "adopted by pro's en masse". To me that would clearly mean Nikon F. Before that, other types of cameras were primarily used by pros, Rolleixlex TLRs, Leica and Contax rangefinders, even Speed Graphics. Nikon F changed that and gradually moved practically all photojournalists to SLRs.
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