How pride of innovation lead to corporate identity.

There was a time when pride of innovation dictated corporate identity, unlike today, when decisions are often made by the company’s bean-counters, who may know the price of everything, but the value of nothing. Little men proud of their great generals but not of themselves. People that admires ideas they have not had, and the less they understand something, the more firmly they believe in it…

Well… That was the time when corporations, Nikon included, put their best minds to work developing utterly amazing products, doing more than just commercially viable garbage.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, groundbreaking work allowed Nikon to thrive and dominate the professional market for 35mm SLR camera and lens technology, while its logo became familiar to almost everyone. Still, in 1998, just before digital cameras established themselves as the future of photography, when autofocus was there to stay, when shutter dials were set to a letter, rather than a number, Nikon decided to do something weird; create a manual-focus, 35mm film SLR, a throwback that’s closer to perfect than any film camera Nikon had previously produced:

The Nikon FM3a.

Nikon knew some shooters will always prefer SLRs (others are wrong) so, in February 2001 at the PMA show in Orlando, Florida, Nikon brought us the all-new-old-fashion Nikon FM3a, a machine that creates the desire to go back to basics. An instant classic.