Such a mess would never have happened with the Ford Edsel. Not one car company would have thought of naming its new product Edsel 1...
I don't see how you think it was "over the top". It was competitive and nothing more. As to making money, there was a lot of money made. Enough to pay for also having a full suite of professional accessories that was needed to be competitive as a full system camera. That investment in a full system is why Canon moved from "one of the other four" against Nikon to an actual competitor unlike the half-hearted systems from Pentax (with their LX), Minolta (with their XK) and Olympus (with their OM family) who all produced system cameras but didn't create the system.
By over the top, I meant its extreme mechanical complexity. Canon even boasted it used more parts than any existing camera. They even named a huge number in an ad. Unfortunately I'm unable to quote that number (1000?, 10000?). * Was it necessary? The competition achieved identical performance with less parts. And the "new" F1 was based on a simpler mechanical design.
It certainly wasn't significantly more complex than the Nikon F2. I wonder if that was a launch ad that came out between the launch of the Canon F-1 in the Spring and the launch of the Nikon F2 that Fall and compared the Canon F-1 with the simpler, and twelve years older, Nikon F.
No matter, both cameras were great, yet I dreamt of the F2, anf eventually bought it. But I bitterly missed the Leicaflex' selective metering, and sold the Nikon.
The F1 had more than 10000 parts: “The complexity of this camera knows no bounds, it is a monster of a camera with over 10,000 working parts.”
Thanks! This was also what I was convinced of, thus "over the top". But a fascinating task for the poor repair staff!
The one I still might track down is the Pentax LX but really just because they had one really strange accessory that I never saw anyone else make, I never saw outside the brochure and has intrigued me since it was announced. Along with the normal attachable Accessory Grip B that screwed into the front of the camera, they offered the Accessory Grip A that was designed to be carved to fit the user's fingers.
The LX came too late for Pentax, even though it was a very interesting camera. A good one isn't easy to find nowadays, since it didn't sell well, at least not in Europe. I never saw one in a shop...
Canon learned some of that lesson with the Canonflex in 1959. There they shipped a full "System Camera" only a month after Nikon shipped the Nikon F. Canon, however, didn't have the rest of the system ready.
The whole generation of Contax/Yashica bodies were a leap forward starting with the RTS but had pretty much no system behind them and quickly developed a reputation of having shipped before they were ready and being very unreliable. Kind of the Aston-Martin Lagonda of their day.
Well, on the AX it was brilliant but very limited. If you didn't need more than 10mm focus throw, it was amazing. If you did need more, well, you could manually focus close to what you needed so that 10mm was enough...
I think this will remain a dream. Canon surely never will return to film cameras, that's too much a niche market. I think film shooters (I love to do it) have to rely on vintage cameras, some companies specialized on servicing them, and maybe a successfully launched start-up that makes a new camera with one of the most established mounts (that would be most likely Nikon's F and Canon's FD-Mount). So far, every attempt for a crowd-funded film DSLR start-up ended quickly after a short hype in the net.
Nikon's Zf seems to be an ergonomic horror, according to comments in the net I read about this camera, users even struggle to switch between auto and fixed ISO. As an old FM-2 user for me this is another example why those retro cameras are
. The FM-2 was a simple to use camera (if you knew the basics of classical photography), so skilled photographer could shoot quite fast with it for a manual focusing mechanical camera. So the Zf has nothing in common with the FM-2, despite Nikon's fancy ads.
I thought "retro" was a trend more than a decade back, when Olympus and later Nikon came out with their retro style cameras. The top wheel stack "pyramids" of the Nikon DF really impressed me! Always had the impression that the engineers who created that ergonomic nightmare may have been on a horror trip from illegal substances...
People thought it was a fad when Nikon produced the Df. Likely including Nikon. It sold and kept selling.
So we can conclude: give the people wot they want
As a classical design fan (Dieter Rams!) I personally prefer the old "form follows function" rule, so when I want a vintage style camera in my hands I always would take the real thing, not a body wrapped around a digital computer that pretents to be what it isn't. Indeed, I will do that tomorrow, my New Mamiya 6 waits to be loaded with some rolls of film . But that's my personal approach of course, luckily we all are free to enjoy photography the way we want ... have always good light!Pfah. Film. What a fad. Give me good old silicon glass plates.my New Mamiya 6 waits to be loaded with some rolls of film
