If you’re a Nikon fanboy or fangirl, prepare for something extraordinary. Heck, you’ll love this video even if you’re like me and not a gearhead at all. Bellamy Hunt, a.k.a. Japan Camera Hunter, visited the Nikon Museum in Tokyo, and he brings you a piece of this Nikon shooters’ mecca.
Bellamy takes you to a walk around the museum in the video that had me add one more place to my bucket list. The Nikon Museum shows the history and versatility of the company. There are optical and precision instruments, telescopes, and of course – the camera gear. That’s what we’re all about, right?
In the museum, you can see underwater cameras for scuba diving. There is a bunch of rare, prototype, and projector lenses, as well as rare and prototype cameras. You can see the 12-1700mm, the longest zoom lens in the world. There’s also a fisheye medium format from 1957. Yup, Nikon made a medium format camera. The museum even shows Nikon’s optical glass, as the company makes its own.
I found it especially interesting that Nikon and Canon didn’t use to be rivals. I learned from Bellamy’s video that they, in fact, worked together. What we know today as Nikon and Canon used to collaborate in the 1930s. Nikon made some lenses for Canon, leading to the launch of Japan’s first camera, and you can read more about it here.
I’m not much of a gearhead, which you can probably conclude from the intro. Still, I really enjoyed this video and the virtual visit to the Nikon Museum. When traveling becomes the thing again, and I visit Japan, this is the place I’d like to visit. What about you? Would you like to visit the Nikon Museum? Or perhaps you already have?
[Camera Geekery: The Nikon Museum via ISO 1200]