Among its famous products are Nikkor imaging lenses (for F-mount cameras, large format photography, photographic enlargers, and other applications), the Nikon F-series of 135 film SLR cameras, the Nikon D-series of digital SLR cameras, the Coolpix series of compact digital cameras, and the Nikonos series of underwater film cameras. Nikon's main competitors in camera and lens manufacturing include Canon, Casio, Kodak, Sony, Pentax, Panasonic, Fujifilm and Olympus.

Founded in 1917 as Nippon Kōgaku Kōgyō Kabushikigaisha (日本光学工業株式会社 "Japan Optical Industries Corporation"), the company was renamed Nikon Corporation, after its cameras, in 1988. Nikon is one of the companies of the Mitsubishi Group. The name Nikon, which dates from 1946, is a merging of Nippon Kōgaku (日本光学: "Japan Optical") and an imitation of Zeiss Ikon. Nikon is pronounced differently around the world. The Japanese pronunciation of the name is /nikoɴ/, but in the United States people also use /ˈnaɪkɒn/ and /ˈnɪkɒn/.

History

Nikon Corporation was established in 1917 when three leading optical manufacturers merged to form a comprehensive, fully integrated optical company known as Nippon Kogaku Kokyo K.K. Over the next sixty years this growing company became a leading manufacturer of optical lenses (including those for the first Canon cameras) and precision equipment used in cameras, binoculars, microscopes and inspection equipment. During World War II the company grew to nineteen factories and 23,000 employees, supplying items such as binoculars, lenses, bomb sights and periscopes to the Japanese military.

Reception outside Japan

After the war it reverted to its civilian product range with a single factory. In 1948, the first Nikon-branded camera was released, the Nikon I. Nikon lenses were popularised by the American photojournalist David Douglas Duncan's use at the time of the Korean War. Duncan, who was working in Tokyo when the Korean War began, met a young Japanese photographer, Jun Miki, who introduced Duncan to Nikon lenses. From July 1950 to January 1951, Duncan covered the Korean War. Fitting Nikon optics to his Leica rangefinder cameras produced high contrast negatives with very sharp resolution at the centre field.

The rise of the Nikon F series

The well-made Nikon SP and other 1950s and 1960s rangefinder cameras competed directly with models from Leica and Zeiss. However, the company quickly ceased developing its rangefinder line to focus its efforts on the Nikon F single-lens reflex line of cameras, which became an unexpectedly huge success upon its introduction in 1959. For nearly 30 years, Nikon's F-series SLRs were the most widely used small-format cameras among professional photographers, as well as by the U.S. space program, both because of their rugged construction and because of the wide range of Nikkor lenses and other accessories.

Nikon popularized many features in professional SLR photography, such as the modular camera system with interchangeable lenses, viewfinders, motor drives, and data backs; integrated light metering and lens indexing; electronic strobe flashguns instead of expendable flashbulbs; electronic shutter control; evaluative multi-zone "matrix" metering; and built-in motorized film advance. However, as autofocus SLRs became available from Minolta and others in the mid-1980s, Nikon's line of manual-focus cameras began to seem out of date.