Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/02/05

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Subject: Re: [Leica] F3 sales and Apo-Els
From: Ken Iisaka <kiisaka@pacbell.net>
Date: Sat, 05 Feb 2000 21:26:37 -0800

> Mike Johnson wrote..
> "When the NOS runs out,
> that's all for the old F3. Nikon has not actually built them for many
> years now and will never actually build them again."
>
> That is a tragedy for a number of reasons. The first, of course, is
that the
> F3 is one terrific manual SLR and it will be too bad to see it go. The
> second is that its demise will mark the end of the traditional F
line...The
> f100, F5, and even F4 not being traditional Fs...well, maybe the 4 is
an F
> on steroids...

I would like to know the source of Mike's information.  Nikon in Japan
was taking orders for F3H (a special version of F3 with pellicle mirror
that shoots 13 fps) as recently as last summer, and Nikon announced
termination of accepting new orders for F3/T just before Christmas.
With the announcement, Nikon guaranteed delivery of these bodies if
ordered by certain dates.  It's either Nikon was very confident that
their inventory would exceed the order, or they were still making them
new.  If it is indeed true that Nikon has terminated production of F3,
that would be a tragedy, but sales of manual SLR bodies, particularly
FM2 is still very brisk in Japan, for example.