On 12/16/2009 3:03 PM Percival P. Cassidy spake thus:

David Nebenzahl wrote:

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.

Kodak did make some cameras used by serious photogs, even after the
Japanese kicked our asses in that arena, but they were mostly obscure
models used by specialists. Like their view (studio) cameras and lenses
made for aerial photography, to name a couple. Their one top-of-the-line
35mm camera (the Ektra) was already out of production by that time.
After that, about the best they could come up with were consumer-level
cameras, like the Instamatic, which they did sell by the millions. But
all high-quality stuff was, as you point out, either German (Leica,
Voigtlander), Swedish (Hassy), or, mostly, Japanese (lessee: Nikon,
Canon, Ricoh, Minolta, Miranda, Yashica, Olympus, Bronica, Fuji, etc., etc.

The single exception I can think of is the Graflex press cameras (Crown
and Speed Graphics), made here in the US and used around the world up
through the 1970s.


--
I am a Canadian who was born and raised in The Netherlands. I live on
Planet Earth on a spot of land called Canada. We have noisy neighbours.

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