Japan, 1976. At Nippon Kogaku, the company now called Nikon, an engineering team has its next flagship camera nearly finished. It has an electronically controlled shutter and an automatic exposure circuit, and almost all of its problems are solved. Nikon's own account calls it "solid, practical, and well conceived." Then the team starts the project again from the beginning.
The camera that came out of that restart was the Nikon F3, released in March 1980. Its body and motor drive were shaped by Giorgetto Giugiaro, the Italian designer whose studio drew the first Volkswagen Golf. He gave the F3 a grip and a thin red line, and Nikon kept versions of that line on its cameras for decades. This is the story of why Nikon set aside a working camera, and how a car designer came to draw the Nikon F3.
- Maker: Nippon Kogaku K.K., now Nikon Corporation, Japan
- Released: March 1980, at 175,000 yen with a 50mm f/1.4 lens. More than 751,000 sold by September 1992
- Designer: Giorgetto Giugiaro (born 1938), who designed the exterior of the body and the MD-4 motor drive
- What made it different: a quartz-timed electronic shutter, metering through a mirror with pinholes, an LCD in the finder, and a grip marked with a red line
The camera that was never released
The Nikon F2 came out in September 1971 and sold well. Some critics still saw it as a set of careful improvements. According to Nikon's history, the development section wanted the next model to show a real step forward.
The starting question was how an electronically controlled shutter could make a camera simpler to use. Such a shutter offers two things: automatic exposure, and long exposures that stay accurate. There had been practically no requests for automatic exposure on the F2. Nikon planned it for the F3 anyway, on the bet that it would matter even to professionals in the future.
Work on the F3 started in 1973. The first version kept the interchangeable finder of the F2. The meter and the exposure circuit sat inside a Photomic finder, as they had before. Nikon's account says the result might have been sold as the "F3 Photomic AE". It was a reasonable successor to the F2.
It was never released.
Why Nikon restarted the F3
The first reason was a new way to measure light. Nikon's engineers wanted the meter in the camera body, not in the finder. That way every finder would meter, including the waist-level and action finders, which had no meter of their own. After years of research they arrived at a mirror with tiny holes in it. Light passing through the holes reaches a sensor at the bottom of the mirror box.
Moving the meter into the body made the finder smaller and the camera lighter. It also meant packing far more electronics into the body. Around the same time, three more technologies became available: an electromagnetic shutter release, quartz control of shutter speeds, and the liquid crystal display.
The team decided to use all of them, even though it meant restarting the whole project. Nikon's history calls it a tough decision for the leader of the development team. The entire plan was renewed in 1976.
The second reason was a person.
Giugiaro, the car designer
Giorgetto Giugiaro was born in 1938. In 1968 he founded the studio later known as Italdesign, in Moncalieri, Italy, with Aldo Mantovani. In the 1970s the studio created the Volkswagen Scirocco, the first-generation Volkswagen Golf and the Audi 80. It also designed the DeLorean DMC-12.
Nikon's account says Giugiaro was introduced to Nippon Kogaku by a well-known journalist and photographer who wrote about cars. The account does not name him. It gives his reason in one sentence: "An international product like a Nikon camera should have an international design."
Giugiaro did not only style the F3. Nikon also asked him to do the final exterior design of the Nikon EM. That small, low-priced camera was launched in March 1979. By the end of 1984 the EM had sold 1.53 million units.
The grip, the motor and the red line
Giugiaro proposed a grip on the front of the body. He also proposed that the body and the external motor drive should share one matching shape. According to Nikon, these and other ideas made it clear that a new electronic camera had been born. The final revision was nearly complete by late 1977, and formal design began in March of that year.
Nikon's corporate history describes the result in two parts. There is a simple form with a concave section on the front for gripping. And there is a red vertical line. Nikon says the design had a large influence on later cameras. Neither Nikon nor Italdesign, in the sources used here, explains why the line is red.
The motor drive mattered as much as the body. Nikon designed the MD-4 as an integral part of the camera, not an accessory. It ran at 6 frames per second, up from 4 on the F2, without a higher voltage. A coreless motor and a more efficient gear train made that possible. The eight AA cells in the MD-4 could also power the camera body.
Italdesign's own project page describes the work as the ergonomics of a highly professional object. It singles out the motor block. Its base is rhomboid, so it sits in the palm, and it helps center the weight of the whole camera.
The line outlived the F3. Hagerty lists the Nikon L35AF compact of 1983 among Giugiaro's work for Nikon, with the same red stripe. In 2006 the same studio designed the Nikon D2X and D2H. There the line turned horizontal, just below the shutter button. Italdesign's project page calls the vertical line "an almost distinctive hallmark of any modern Nikon camera."
The Nikon F3 that went to space
In the fall of 1978 the F3 prototype was finished. That same fall, NASA asked Nippon Kogaku for cameras for the first space shuttle, due to fly in 1981. The request built on Nikon's record with the Photomic FTN, which it had supplied for the Apollo and Skylab programs in the 1970s.
The specification was strict. NASA wanted automatic exposure cameras within a year and a half. Each had to take 250 pictures in total and allow the film to be changed during photography. Nikon accepted, using what it had learned on the F3.
It built two cameras. The "Big" camera took long film for 250 exposures. The "Small" camera took 72 exposures on thin film. Both were delivered in May 1980, two months after the F3 went on sale. They passed NASA's tests at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
The Small camera flew on the space shuttle Columbia in April 1981. According to Nikon, it completed the mission with no backup camera on board. NASA ran its own tests on other equipment as well, as the Journal piece on the Speedmaster and NASA's eleven tests describes.
Inside the Nikon F3
The pinhole mirror is the part most owners never see. Nikon's history says it holds about 50,000 elliptical holes, each 20 by 30 micrometers, in the center of the reflex mirror. Light passing through them goes to a sub-mirror and then to a sensor at the bottom of the mirror box.
That layout had three results. The same sensor could read flash light reflected off the film, so the SB-12 Speedlight gave automatic flash exposure through the lens. Changing the finder or the focusing screen needed no exposure compensation. And the F3 could take four finders, five once the high-eyepoint DE-3 arrived, plus 20 focusing screens.
The F3 was the first Nippon Kogaku camera to show exposure data on an LCD. Shutter speeds were timed by a quartz crystal, which made the slow speeds far more accurate. The shutter ran from 8 seconds to 1/2,000 second, and film speeds could be set from ISO 12 to 6,400. The body weighed 700 grams (24.7 ounces) and measured 148.5 by 96.5 by 65.5 millimeters (about 5.8 by 3.8 by 2.6 inches).
The F3 runs on two SR44 silver cells, which Nikon then called G13. In 1980 those cells were hard to find in some regions. So Nikon kept a mechanical shutter speed of 1/60 second, fired with a backup release lever when the cells are flat. For why springs still matter, read why a mechanical SLR still works.
The Nikon F3 today
The F3 family grew quickly. The F3 High-Eyepoint, with the DE-3 finder, arrived in March 1982. The titanium-bodied F3/T followed the same year. In April 1983 came the F3AF, an autofocus camera built on the F3 body with the DX-1 finder and two special autofocus lenses.
The camera also lasted. In a Nikon chronicle written around 1998, the F3 High-Eyepoint was still on sale beside the F5. That made its run longer than that of the original Nikon F. Nikon's corporate history dates the end of production to 2000 in one passage and 2001 in another.
A buyer today mostly wants to know which F3 it is. The standard model has the DE-2 finder. The High-Eyepoint wears the DE-3, and the F3/T has a titanium body. How a given camera looks and works belongs on its own listing.
Back to 1976
In 1976 Nikon set aside a camera that worked. What came back four years later had a grip, a motor drive drawn as part of the body, and a meter hidden in a mirror. Nikon's account says the F3 reinforced the idea that a high-end camera should look like what it can do. On the F3, a thin red line still marks the place where the fingers go.
You can browse all 35mm film cameras in the shop.
Sources
- Nikon, Camera Chronicle: Debut of Nikon F3: release date and price, Giugiaro's role on the F3 and the EM, EM sales, development dates, the NASA cameras, specifications, the pinhole mirror, batteries and backup speed, variants, sales and end of production
- Nikon, Camera Chronicle Vol. 3: Nikon F3 (first published in Nikkor Club Quarterly): the F3 Photomic AE, the 1973 start and 1976 restart, the introduction of Giugiaro and the quote, his ideas, the F3 still on sale beside the F5
- Italdesign, project page: F3 (1980): ergonomics and the MD-4 motor block
- Italdesign, project page: Nikon D2X/D2H (2006): the red line as a Nikon hallmark, and its horizontal position on the D2X
- Italdesign, Our history: founding in 1968, Aldo Mantovani, Moncalieri, the Golf, Scirocco, Audi 80 and DeLorean
- Antony Ingram, Hagerty UK, on cameras by car designers: the red stripe on the Nikon L35AF
- Photos, all via Wikimedia Commons: "Nikon F3 1.jpg" and "Nikon F3 2.JPG" by Martintoy, CC BY 3.0; "Nikon F3 Giugiaro Camera Design" by Austin Calhoon and "1981 Nikon F3 Big Camera NASA Modified" by Morio, CC BY-SA 3.0; "Nikon F3 and 50mm lens cutaway at Nikon Museum" by 4300streetcar, CC BY 4.0
Sources compiled and text drafted with AI assistance. Published by Unseend.