Konica FS-1 - The Beginning of the End for Konica

The Groundbreaking FS-1. Available in your choice of black.

    Konica (Konishiroku)...the original Japanese photographic company, and the first of only two full-line manufacturers (meaning both equipment and consumables such as film, paper, and chemicals), with Fujifilm being the second. Often overlooked among the Japanese 35mm SLR manufacturers due to its small slice of market share, and running a distant third to Kodak and Fujifilm when it came to consumables sales during the last four decades of the film era, Konica nevertheless was very influential in both sectors well into the 1980s. They also played a large role in the enforcement of the JCII standards for all Japanese optical equipment sold for export from the mid-1950s - '90s, supplying the optical testing lenses used in the assessment process for all of the other manufacturers (many of which, ironically, went on to have more notoriety in the photographic community than Konica's own underrated Auto Reflex or AR Hexanon lens lineup).

    Konica had a reputation for innovation: they were part of the Japanese consortiums that developed the first metal-blade, vertical-travel focal plane shutters and improved rare-earth optical glasses in the early-'60s; then they introduced the first Japanese autoexposure SLR (the shutter-priority Auto-Reflex) in 1965, and subsequently added through-the-lens (TTL) metering to that in 1968 (the Autoreflex T). Fast forward to 1979, and the FS-1 would prove to be the progenitor of the final generation of Konica's AR-mount 35mm SLRs, while introducing more industry-firsts. But the seeds of Konica's SLR demise would unwittingly be sown simultaneously...  

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