Oldest existing Nikon I camera goes up for auction with original lens and case

You are clueless as to why I made the comment.

Collectors desire because they have a Void which they don't know how to fill, collecting such items shall never even begin to fill this Void.

A Nikon will fill the void left by a lack of Nikons... a Kiev never will.

Nikon didn't copy a "superior" Leica, Nikon improved on the Contax design. Quite a difference.

Yeah a bit like today's news of Xiaomi "improving" the Note 7 ;)

Marc, you are right that the body style, the nice long-base RF and the mount* were copied from the Contax II. However, the focal-plane shutter is a horizontal rubberized-cloth type similar to Leica, not the vertical-travelling tambour-style metal blinds of the Contax. IMO this was a good thing. Despite some claims to the contrary, in my experience the old screwmount Leica shutters usually work as found, though sometimes a bit sluggish, while old Contax shutters usually do not.

*The Nikon RF lens-mount is mechanically compatible and works fine with Contax lenses that have their own focusing mechanism (helicoid). However the focusing calibration is not accurately matched between Nikon and Contax for "normal" 50mm lenses that rely on the body's internal focusing system.

Ben, I agree with you except for the bomber story. The FED factory started making Leica copies in the 1930s, well before any opportunity to extract one from an American airplane. Leicas were well-known around the world before the war.

The prefix "609" comes from the completion date of the first prototype. It was completed in September 1946. Therefore 6/09 or 609. Serial numbers 6091-60921 correspond to 21 prototypes. Production began in March 1948 with the serial number 60922. 60924 is the third production camera.

It's beautiful.

In some ways this is the product that started the whole "Made in Japan" thing going.
I'm old enough to remember cheap tin toys from Japan or Hong Kong, and I remember when the cheap wrenches and screwdrivers from the hardware store were from Japan.
After the war Japanese industry knew they had a long way to go to convince the world their products were world class. But before Honda crushed the British motorcycle business, and before Sony wiped out American televisions, Nikon (Nippon Kogaku Tokyo) took on the German optical business.
This camera was right there, at the beginning of it all.

About 100 with Adox CMS 20 film!

Small thing: while it's definitely true that Germany dominated the optics field prior to WWII, it's not really accurate to say that Japan "had nothing" in optics. By the early to mid 1930s, Nikon was building a wide range of very high quality optical instruments (but not any consumer cameras), and there were several other fairly advanced optical firms in Japan in the 1930s. Most of the products they made were industrial or military, so they're not necessarily well known, but the optical industry in Japan was already quite advanced by the beginning of the war.

Pretty sure that Germany never occupied Japan...

If you are in the U.S., Canada, Europe, or eastern Asia and you had to ask this, then you ought to go back to high school!

For the sake of completeness and trivia, IIRC the closest Germany ever came to occupying Japan was probably the German colony and military base at Tsingtao, China. And that is why there has so long been a western-style Tsingtao Beer.

It was 'Unconditional Surrender' to the Allied forces. I'm old enough to have played with toys labeled 'Germany, British Occupied Zone' or 'Germany, U.S. Occupied Zone'. Of course, given the number of U.S. troops and bases in Japan and Germany now, one could argue that they are still occupied countries. Iraq wasn't liberated either. It was also defeated, but occupied without any terms of surrender being signed by an Iraqi government; very different from the surrenders of Germany and Japan.

The US forced them to take action by cutting them off from their resource base. History didn't begin at Pearl Harbor.

Not quite"full frame." This camera had a film gate of 24×32 mm. The S2 of 1953 had the 24×36 mm dimension.

@Slouch Hooligan

And why did US do that? Because Japan staged Mukden Incident, invaded Manchuria, and established a puppet regime by installing Puyi (the last emperor) as a figurehead. All and all because Japan needed more "living space" i.e. "Lebensraum" (perhaps this German word sounds more familiar in Westerners' ears?). Ever heard of Jinan Incident that Japanese Army mercilessly tortured and murdered 17 Chinese DIPLOMATS in Jinan on May 3, 1928?

"History didn't begin at Pearl Harbor." Well said.

Only 24x32mm you say, Kodachromeguy? I guess that makes it significantly less than full frame--Macro Four Thirds!

And Endofoto, Japan had nobody but themselves to blame for what happened to them in WWII. They used pretty severe brutality to try to build an empire, and got stuffed.

History didn't begin in 1928 either. Nor did it begin in the Philippines in 1899 when the US began a campaign of "liberation" that took 3 years and killed more than 3 million Filipinos, the largest extermination on Earth until Nazi Germany. No doubt there are many "good" reasons for all that too. My point is, and was, that in the course of history it is futile to seek first causes. Everything flows from what went before.

A great book to read is "Japan 1941" by Eri Hotta. Going back to 1882 it traces, step by step, how Japan trapped herself into a corner.

0mitchAG
It wasn't an "incident", it was a years long campaign that took more than 3 million Filipino lives. It was part of the US push to control the Pacific. The Japanese, as competitors in the region took note and emulated the action later in China and elsewhere.
My point is, and has been, that the US never held the moral high ground.

You're right. I think you can't generalise morality - many countries have some nasty history - it's simply human nature, and while China was a victim in most of that, they certainly don't appear to have moved in a positive direction from it today. History is about winners and losers more than who is right or wrong, but many conflicts are a direct result of opposing ideologies and righteousness. What went around is coming around again because certain major players have failed to learn from the past.

I think you'd be hard-pressed to say that any country has, consistently and over many years, held the moral high-ground. However, countries behaving very badly, like Japan did from about 1931 to 1945, have no cause to complain when another country stomps them, like the US (with some help from the Brits, Oz, NZ, etc.) did to to Japan.