Nikon: Duncan's Korean War Lenses, the Nikon F and the RED Cinema Buyout

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Nikon was founded in 1917 as Nippon Kogaku Kogyo, a merger of three Japanese optical makers producing microscopes, binoculars and telescopes, and later periscopes and bomb sights for the Japanese military. The Nikkor lens name arrived in 1932 and the Nikon camera name in 1946, and early Canon cameras relied on Nikon lenses. During the Korean War, Life photographer David Douglas Duncan, introduced to Nikkor lenses by Jun Miki in Tokyo, mounted them on his Leica bodies, and the sharp, high-contrast results made Nikon's name worldwide. The 1959 Nikon F single lens reflex began three decades of dominance among professionals, and a modified, motor-driven Nikon F flew on Apollo 15 in 1971.

Loyalty to the F-mount slowed Nikon's autofocus, and after Canon launched its all-electronic EF mount in 1987, Canon's white lenses took over the sidelines in the 1990s. Nikon's D1 arrived in 1999, its first full-frame digital body, the D3, in 2007, and the 2008 D90 became the first digital SLR to shoot video. After the Nikon 1 series and the DL compacts canceled in 2017, Nikon launched the Z-mount in 2018 and bought RED Digital Cinema in April 2024. EssilorLuxottica held 18.53 percent of Nikon by March 2026, and under new CEO Yasuhiro Omura the company reported a 112.4 billion yen operating loss for fiscal 2026, driven largely by impairments tied to its 2023 purchase of German metal 3D printer maker SLM Solutions.

• Early autofocus bodies such as the F3AF were compromised by the effort to keep old manual lenses working.
• Nikon introduced Japan's first commercial stepper for chipmaking in 1980 and led lithography until about 2002, before ASML took the high end.
• In 2015 Nikon bought Optos, a British maker of ultra-wide-field retinal imaging systems.
• Nikon formed a joint venture with Essilor in 1999.
• The Z9 flagship did away with the mechanical shutter entirely.