In 1959, Nippon Kogaku’s first SLR, the Nikon F, took the professional camera market by storm – so much so that the company continued making it until 1974, a run of 15 years and 862,000 cameras.
But it wanted to expand beyond the somewhat limited professional market in order to sell more lenses. It needed a lower-priced camera, but its big problem was that it had very limited production capacity at that time. The manufacturer needed to source this camera elsewhere… so, it turned to Mamiya.
Of course, new cameras don’t just appear on demand. They take years to develop. But it so happened that when Nippon Kogaku (now Nikon) came calling, Mamiya had a new camera body almost ready. It agreed to modify it to accept Nikon lenses and, in June 1962, the Nikkorex F was born.
This new Nikkorex was a bit of a gamble for Nikon, as it used the then-new and unproven Copal Square, vertical-run, metal-blade, focal plane shutter. Copal, along with Mamiya, Pentax and Konica, were to be the only firms to receive the shutter once it became available – and Nikon was not on the list. But Mamiya was, and it built the Nikkorex F under contract.
The Copal Square shutter proved reliable and a huge success. So much so that virtually all modern focal plane shutters now use its basic design.
