The Nikon Museum

logan2z · Jan 28, 2021

Cool video I thought might be of interest...

mooseontheloose · Jan 28, 2021

Very interesting! I'll have to stop by there the next time I'm up in Tokyo. That medium format fisheye is very cool.

BradS · Jan 28, 2021

Very cool! Thanks.

He pronounces Nikon funny.

mooseontheloose · Jan 28, 2021

BradS said:
Very cool! Thanks.

He pronounces Nikon funny.

Yeah, I only pronounce it that way if I'm speaking to Japanese (otherwise they won't know what I'm talking about). But in my everyday life (mostly in head) it's still mostly nye-kon (damn you Paul Simon!).

George Mann · Jan 29, 2021

The correct pronunciation is neekon, like neekkor and neekkormat.

There is no I (eye) in Japanese.

logan2z · Jan 29, 2021

George Mann said:
The correct pronunciation is neekon, like neekkor and neekkormat.

There is no I (eye) in Japanese.

I thought he was pronouncing it 'Nickon', but he has a 'funny' accent so I may have misheard

Sirius Glass · Jan 29, 2021

Going there would be life threatening for me. I would explode with GAS.

BradS · Jan 29, 2021

The guy (Bellamy?) pronounces ‘glass’ funny too.

BradS · Jan 29, 2021

logan2z said:
I thought he was pronouncing it 'Nickon', but he has a 'funny' accent so I may have misheard

Yeah, I think he’s saying knee-con too but, of course, on this side of the pond we say nye-con. As in that song, Kodachrome....
“I got a Nikon camera,
love to take a photograph,
So mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away”.

George Mann · Jan 29, 2021

logan2z said:
I thought he was pronouncing it 'Nickon', but he has a 'funny' accent so I may have misheard

Japanese words can be confusing as some i's are pronounced eeh (traditionally with I being the first letter), and ih with the I placed within the word. But this is not always the case.

Technically, Nikon should be Nihkon, but its founder is rumored to have pronounced it Neekon.

Of course, the doesn't prevent people from pronouncing it however they wish.

benjiboy · Jan 30, 2021

I don't know if it's true or where I heard or read it, or if my father who fought the Japanese in Burma told me but I heard there are no swear words in Japanese.

Les Sarile · Jan 30, 2021

Nikon has the best information and this video shows their commitment to preserving their history. I only wish others had documented theirs as well . . .

This video confirms that Nikon was the other Japanese company that made their own optical glass . . .

Les Sarile · Jan 30, 2021

I have a similar F3 bellows setup on display at their museum starting at about 14:23 of the video . . .

AnselMortensen · Jan 30, 2021

And Minolta is pronounced "Mi-No-Ru-Ta", spoken smoothly with no accent on any syllable.

villagephotog · Jan 31, 2021

George Mann said:
Japanese words can be confusing as some i's are pronounced eeh (traditionally with I being the first letter), and ih with the I placed within the word. But this is not always the case.

Technically, Nikon should be Nihkon, but its founder is rumored to have pronounced it Neekon.

Of course, the doesn't prevent people from pronouncing it however they wish.

Nikon Corporation (that's the Japanese parent company) officially blesses all regional pronunciations, so there is no single "correct" pronunciation. This fact is easy to verify by looking at advertising produced by Nikon's subsidiaries around the world, which all use varying regional pronunciation (i.e. 'nick-on' in the UK, 'nye-kon' in the U.S., 'nee-kon' in Japan etc.)

'Nikon' is a made up word -- a brand name neologism, like 'Xerox' or 'Microsoft' -- created and owned by what is now Nikon Corp (formerly Nippon Kogaku, K.K.) so the company is the sole authority on this question, and they are quite clear about it: they approve all varying regional pronunciations. The good news is that we're all doing it right!

Also, Nikon does not have a founder in any normal sense of that word. Nippon Kogaku K.K. (Japan Optical, Inc.) was created by the Mitsubishi industrial combine (zaibatsu) in 1917. It was formed by combining three pre-existing optical companies, which Mitsubishi bought and merged into what is now Nikon. Mitsubishi owned Nippon Kogaku outright until 1947, when the U.S. occupation authorities disbanded the zaibatsu and all of Mitsubishi's subsidiaries became technically independent companies.

Nippon Kogaku first used the 'Nikkor' brand name in the early 1930s on lenses that the company made for aerial cameras, if memory serves. The 'Nikon' brand name was not created until 1947/48 when Nippon Kogaku began to make its first consumer cameras (it made aerial cameras for the Japanese military in the 1930s-40s, but the cameras themselves were not branded; they just said 'Nippon Kogaku').

villagephotog · Jan 31, 2021

Les Sarile said:
Nikon has the best information and this video shows their commitment to preserving their history. I only wish others had documented theirs as well . . .

This video confirms that Nikon was the other Japanese company that made their own optical glass . . .

Nikon would be upset to know that anyone ever had any doubt about that. Its glass factory (Hikari Glass, ltd.) is shown on Nikon Corp's list of subsidiaries.

Nippon Kogaku, K.K. (what is now Nikon) was the first real optical glass manufacturer in Japan. Creating an indigenous Japanese optical glass industry was the primary reason (or one of the two primary reasons) why Nikon was formed by Mitsubishi at the request (really it was an order) of the Japanese Imperial Navy. The Navy had a small experimental optical glass lab/foundry, which it turned over to Mitsubishi, and Mitsubishi bought a plate glass manufacturer and an eyeglass lens maker, along with a microscope manufacturer, and fused them all into a single company -- what is now Nikon. The first thing that company did was to begin development of high-quality optical glass in Japan. Previously, the Japanese had to buy optical glass from European suppliers, and the Japanese Navy considered this a security risk.

Nikon was essentially the only Japanese supplier of optical-grade glass in the 1920s, and the leader through the 1930s. (Ohara Glass was founded in 1935 and Hoya began making optical glass in 1941.) So, Nikon really started the optical glass industry in Japan, in addition to starting Japan's high-precision lens industry (i.e. for instruments other than eyeglasses, with the exception of microscopes, which were made, badly, in Japan before Nikon).

The Nikon Museum

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