Percival P. Cassidy wrote:
David Nebenzahl wrote:

snip

I predict the Chinese are following the same arc that the Japanese did
after WWII, with variations, of course; there's no Marshall Plan, and
the countries are vastly different. Nonetheless, I can forsee the day
when "Made in China" is no longer a call for derision.

By way of showing just how wrong people can be when predicting who's
winning the industrial game, here's a hilariously and astoundingly
wrong prediction about the Japanese and American photographic
industries from 1946: http://rick_oleson.tripod.com/index-136.html


In UK in the late 1950s already, when I was becoming seriously
interested in photography, I don't think any American cameras were
considered high quality. The really good stuff was Leica (German) and
Hasselblad (Swedish? -- both mucho expensivo). Praktica (E. German) was
OK. Some of the Japanese brands were coming onto the market, IIRC. I'm
not sure that Kodak was considered a serious photographer's camera.

Perce

Olympus made at least one fantastic camera around that time - or was it
the early sixties? I had an Olympus PenE, half frame SLR that took
fantastic pictures.