NIKON : History of the World's Best Camera brand

In 1917 three of Japans leading optical manufacturers merged to form a comprehensive, fully integrated optical company known as Nippon Kogaku K.K. They launched their optical glass production and research in 1918. At the beginning of the early development of their optical lenses they invited optical engineers from Germany. They needed to catch up with technology from more advanced countries and they eventually developed a series of lenses modeled after the Zeiss Tessar lens named "Anytar".

In 1932 they adopted Nikkor as their brand name for their camera lenses and in 1946 they adopted the name Nikon for their cameras. In 1959 Nikon introduced the Nikon F, their first SLR camera. The Nikon F was a largely successful camera that became a worthy rival to the popular German manufacturers Leica and Zeiss.
Many professional photographers and photojournalists began using the Nikon F. In 1980 the successful Nikon Brand delivered its cameras to NASA for use on the space shuttle, a show of their superior quality. In 1988 the company was renamed Nikon Corporation, after its line of cameras. In 1992 the Nikonos RS was marketed as the worlds first underwater auto focus SLR camera.

The Nikon D1 was marketed in 1999 paving the way for Nikons professional level Digital SLR series. In the mid 2000's the general trend in the industry was that the sale of consumer and professional level film cameras was falling quickly due to the increase of digital cameras and their increasing affordability. At the beginning of 2006 Nikon announced it would stop making most of its film cameras and all of its large format lenses. Today Nikon is still one of the leading manufacturers of professional level cameras with its current model being the D3X.