Nikon Sendai Plant Tour

Final assembly of a D3 at the Sendai plant takes one worker 80 minutes.

Matjaz Intihar of e-Photographia has published a virtual tour of Nikon's Sendai plant in Miyagi Prefecture. The pictures of the workers and assembly areas were provided by Nikon, but there are a lot of them. Veeery interesting....

___________________

Mike  (Thanks to Albano)

Comments

[Claire Senft]

This is interesting. I own neither a Nikon or a Canon body. The statement that "back in the film days Nikon's shutters were alwaysmore accurate than Canon's" is news to me. Camera shutters have mostly been electronically timed for many years. The tests that I have seen indicated ruler flat results except at the top speed which maybe were 25% maximum on the slow side. It maybe that Nikon's manual shutters were more accurate than Canon's..it may also not be true.

An interesting acticle all the same.

[Jernej]

a slight correction... his last name is Intihar nor Indehar

[Scott Fleming]

Oh how I enjoyed seeing those happy workerbees toiling away on MY new camera. Work work work you fine highly trained and hopefully well compensated artisans. Do not dally. I'm waiting patiently. #%^))

[alexmv]

The reliance upon women for many of the manufacturing processes is also interesting, and it reminds me of a story I once heard that in the decades prior to the computerization of the computation processes, Nikon kept a staff of women with _soroban_ (abacuses) to do the calculations.

I wonder if other camera-manufacturing related work forces also resemble the Nikon factory staff.

Alex

[david bennett]

I see the author is not a native English speaker and that his comments were translated by the person named in the article.

My hat is off therefore to the translator for this idiomatic English:

"This is me, looking like a right berk and saying Hi from the Sendai plant."

David

[Jernej]

re: David

I just compared the translation and the original text and it made me smile... I suspected it might be something Joze (translator) would try and slip in under the radar and he did... harmless sarcastic comment on his part ;)

[Peter Hovmand]

Yes, very interesting indeed. There is certainly a special spirit at that place. The spirit of Nikon. And Claire, Nikon has always made better mechanical shutters than Canon, ending with the FM3, while Canon stopped being mechanical years and years ago.

[Helcio Tagliolatto]

"The reliance upon women for many of the manufacturing processes is also interesting"

All hi-tech industrial plants I'd visited in Manaus relied upon women to do their precision work...

[Claire Senft]

I guess one is never too old to learn. So, in the article Nikon was credited with making a more precise shutter. I am inclinded to consider more precise as having lesser deviation. Now, I learn that not only has Nikon produced more precision but that from the very first camera Nikon had a "better" shutter. Must of been pretty good for its day..Irwin Puts considered the intial post war Canons to be of better construction than the competing Leica models...and all of this with a shutter inferior to Nikon's.

I have over the years owned a couple of Nikons. Certainly they were better than nothing. Actually much, much better. I purchased the last new Nikon SP that was available during the 60's from Altman's Camera in Chicago. For Its time the camera was fairly good...the lenses were nothing to brag about. Lucky am I to never having owned a Canon and thereby having avoided all of this shutter inferiority. I also owned a couple of F2 cameras one of which died from shutter death.

Perhaps someone would like to cite an authority and statistics that would prove their point of Nikon shutter superiority. For myself I do not consider either shutter brand superior to the other.

But....so what??