David Nebenzahl wrote:
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 high quality Japanese stuff came a decade or more after the high quality
German stuff. But then the Japanese did the thing that they do best,
fiddling with the design to see what people like and what people don't like,
and ended up eating the Germans' lunch--the Germans were so sure that they
knew the _right_ way to do things that they wouldn't fiddle around with the
design to compete with the Japanese. But the Germans still excel at optical
design--Panasonic and Sony both use the Germans for lens design.

In some markets though that approach didn't work, computers being one.

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.