Canon LTM Why Didn't Canon 7 Take Over the World?

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feenej

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7s. It had on board light metering, and a big selection of lenses, etc. So why on earth did PJ's decide to hoist the Nikon F and strap that big heavy hunk of metal to their necks when they could have been carrying the svelte Canon? We should all be talking about dRF's now'days instead of dSLR's. Not just for a motor drive...
 
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Telephoto lenses I guess. I'm sure Capa would disagree but in the days of high velocity ordinance and accurate semi-auto weapons shooting the Vietnam war was probably a little safer with a decent 200...
 
It' s a great question. I think it's because you could drop an F on it's head (or someone else's head) and it would still fine. It does seem to me that RF's are a bit more fragile, but maybe that's been hashed out a million times in the forums so don't flame me if it has. Just trying to think like a PJ. Also, the slr interface has it's niceties as does the RF way...oops, am I banned? 🙂
 
by 1959 it became an SLR kind of world with the Nikon F as its king of the hill.
In the early 60s one could still buy a new Nikon RF camera, or a Leica M3 and M2 or the Canon 7, but SLRs were what most people wanted.
 
Can anyone who lived in the 1960's recall EVER seeing a commercial for Canon 7 or 7s? I never did. I mean - if you're not going to promote your own gear - it shouldn't come as any surprise that you fade away in the marketplace.
 
The Nikon F and other SLRs are just more versatile. They can do closeups easily. They are superb with telephoto lenses that can go far beyond the 135mm limit of RFs. On top of that, they were cheaper to build and much less fragile than RFs.
So the massive shift to SLRs made perfect sense at the time and still does with dSLRs.
But RFs have their place and are great fun.
Eric
 
I always had the suspicion that camera companies liked Slrs
because they sold more lenses with them.
lets face it, a 135mm lens is more impressive when looked thru a penta prism than a tiny rectangle of white lines.
 
I think you have to recognize too, that the vast consumer machine treats these trends as fashion. Not too many folks need a bulletproof F1 to capture baby's first birthday. So, even if the PJs saw great advances in SLR, they were likely mostly lost on the consumer - but the money comes from the mass consumer, so if they believe SLR is the trend, then SLR becomes the trend...

BTW - my grandmother's old Voigtlander Vitessa T still does as well or better than most of my new digicams.
 
Motor drive! Waist level finder for shooting over your head. Glass that already had enormous respect, emphasizing contrast over sharpness, which is the right preference for PJ work.

Also, the 7 and 7s were indeed going into a shrinking market, and they could't use M-mount lenses due to patents, so Leica dominated that market.

The earlier and cheaper P did sell darned well.
 
It basically did. Took over the LTM market. Over 120,000 sold. The Nikon F sold several times more, but over twice as many years in production.

Now- had they made the shutter a bit quieter, put an accessory shoe on the first version, and left the selenium meter off...
 
Didn't the 7s have an arm that linked into an automatic parallax adjustment for external finders? As you focused the lens the finder adjusted with you. It was before my time, but when I was searching for great Brightline finders I ran into some beautiful finders that were almost impossible to use. Canon did build a few adapters that sat between the camera and the finder that would allow for manual adjustment, but very few.

The F was a juggernaut that just kept on going. I suspect that you will see the same thing if anyone can ever get an electronic viewfinder as good as a finder on an F/F2 is. That's where the future of digital camera is.

B2 (;->
 
dreilly said:
Also, the slr interface has it's niceties as does the RF way...oops, am I banned? 🙂
Click to expand...
I was shooting "street" last weekend, and ended up at Java Joe's in the market. So here's an advantage to an SLR for this type of shooting ...

I had an XA, a 35SP and an OM with 24/2.8. Sitting two tables away were a couple of women having a nice conversation, and I wanted a shot of them. I decided to use the 24 on the OM ... I pointed the camera off to their left, but due to the wide lens I could focus on one of the women at the side of the vf. Then just swing the camera to my right at the right time, and voila. Yeah, I know I could use scale focus on an RF, but this was low light with limited DOF, so I think the SLR had an advantage.

Doug, we can form the "Banned from RFF Group -- Roch/Finger Lakes Chapter". 😉

Earl
 
Paul C. Perkins said:
Can anyone who lived in the 1960's recall EVER seeing a commercial for Canon 7 or 7s? I never did. I mean - if you're not going to promote your own gear - it shouldn't come as any surprise that you fade away in the marketplace.
Click to expand...
If memory serves, Canon was the first to do TV ads for 35mm cameras, with John Newcombe (tennis) promoting the AE1. But that wasn't til the mid 70s.
 
Oh, SLR media bias at the time...that's my excuse...

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There were new Leicas in view, but when I had the chance to get my first brand-new, El Serioso camera, I went for a Canon F-1. Could've done worse, of course. 🙂

But, what if I knew then what I know now? Would that we all had this clairvoyance.

In other words, Canon came to rule the world anyway...just not via RFs.


- Barrett
 

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digitalintrigue said:
If memory serves, Canon was the first to do TV ads for 35mm cameras, with John Newcombe (tennis) promoting the AE1. But that wasn't til the mid 70s.
Click to expand...
Correct. Nikon, Olympus and Pentax follwed suit in short order. (Pentax' TV spot, IMO, was the most captivating, and to my knowledge, it was the only TV spot they made, and, given how little TV I was watching even then, it's amazing how I remember.)


- Barrett
 
BillBingham2 said:
Didn't the 7s have an arm that linked into an automatic parallax adjustment for external finders? As you focused the lens the finder adjusted with you. It was before my time, but when I was searching for great Brightline finders I ran into some beautiful finders that were almost impossible to use. Canon did build a few adapters that sat between the camera and the finder that would allow for manual adjustment, but very few.

The F was a juggernaut that just kept on going. I suspect that you will see the same thing if anyone can ever get an electronic viewfinder as good as a finder on an F/F2 is. That's where the future of digital camera is.

B2 (;->
Click to expand...

the VT, L1, L2, L3, VIT and VIL had the pin in the cold shoe for activating the special external finders angle to correct for parallex error.
the Canon P and the 7 and 7s did away with this, the 7 never even had a cold shoe.
 
Could the prefernce for SLR's also been the toughness? I'd hate to knock my Canon RF out of alignment (easy to do) in the heat of a firefight. I guess you drive a tank over an F and not hurt it.
 
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