Glass Bodies a variant-level encyclopedia of vintage lenses and cameras by iwillpat

Nikon 35Ti

Nikon · Fixed lens · 24×36mm on 35mm film, with a 36×13mm panorama crop mode · 1993

Also known as: Nikon 35Ti Quartz Date · Nikon 35Ti QD · ニコン35Ti

Variants & identification

Variant Mount Years Serial ranges Production
Nikon 35Ti Quartz Date 35mm compact 1993–1997 5xxxxxx
US4xxxxx 		About 56,000 sold between December 1993 and September 1997, on a Japanese Nikon specialist's account. Nikon has published no figure
  1. The only production figure anyone has published for this camera comes from a Japanese blog specialising in older Nikons, which states that roughly 56,000 were sold between December 1993 and September 1997, and that the 28Ti managed 17,000 between September 1994 and June 1996 — under a third as many, over a shorter period. The same writer's judgement is that the 35Ti was not a commercial success, being overshadowed by the Contax T2 and the GR series that reached the market first. Nikon has published nothing. The figure is carried here because it is specific, dated and internally consistent, and flagged because it rests on one unofficial source.
  2. That source disclaims itself, and a reader relying on the 56,000 should know it. The blog carries a standing note in its own masthead asking to be read 「話半分」程度に — roughly, take it at half value — and the post gives no source for either number, no citation to a Nikon document and no method. It is a knowledgeable collector's recollection published in 2007 about a camera discontinued a decade earlier. Nothing about it is checkable, and the writer does not claim otherwise. It remains the only figure in print; it is not evidence of the kind the rest of this entry runs on.
  3. That figure and the usual English account of the production span cannot both be right. Mike Eckman notes that the November 1999 issue of Popular Photography still listed both the 35Ti and the 28Ti as current models, which is two years after the Japanese source has the 35Ti stopping and three and a half after it has the 28Ti stopping. A listing in a magazine's round-up is evidence of a camera being sold, not built, so the likeliest reconciliation is that manufacture ended earlier than distribution — but no source states that, and the years in this entry follow the sales dates rather than the magazine.
  4. Nikon's own essay series settles the lens's ancestry. "NIKKOR — The Thousand and One Nights" opens with the Nikkor-O 2.1cm f/4, and in describing the fully symmetrical concave-convexo- concave configuration its author Haruo Sato dubs the "WAKIMOTO type", he adds that "other Nikon developments of the 'WAKIMOTO symmetrical wideangle lens' are the Nikkor 35mm f/2.8 lens on the Nikon 35Ti Quartz Date (1993) and the Nikkor 28mm f/2.8 on the Nikon 28Ti Quartz Date (1994)." Zenji Wakimoto (脇本善司, 1924–1996) was one of the designers of the S- and F-series Nikkors and the creator of the Micro-Nikkor line; the same catalogue carries his 2.1cm f/4 for the rangefinder bodies and the 8.5cm f/1.5 he inherited from Murakami Saburo and carried to completion. A 1993 point-and-shoot is therefore drawing on the same optical idea as a 1959 rangefinder lens, by Nikon's own account rather than by inference.
  5. The resemblance to the 1950s rangefinders was noticed at the time and Nikon did not exactly deny it. English Wikipedia records a company spokesman's reply: "The designers of [the 35Ti] are somewhat younger than the designers of the S2."
  6. Dan Richards reviewed the camera repeatedly for Popular Photography and the verdicts are unusually strong for a compact. Comparing it with the Konica Hexar and the Contax T2 in September 1994 he wrote that "the nod for optical quality has to go to the Nikon 35Ti. As we've noted before, it isn't just that the lens is sharp, but that it has very well-balanced performance — unnoticeable distortion, very little light falloff, exceptional control of flare", and called it "an SLR-quality optic, and a good SLR optic at that". Those pieces are cited through English Wikipedia; the magazine issues were not read directly here.
  7. A leather "antique" case for carrying the camera horizontally on a neck or shoulder strap was sold in September 1994 in a limited run of 3,000 — the only quantity Nikon-adjacent sources attach to anything in this system, and it is an accessory rather than a camera.
  8. The flash guide number is given as 8 by the Modern Classic Nikon Series page and as 11 in feet at ISO 100 by English Wikipedia. Those do not convert into each other, and neither cites a unit for the first.
How to tell them apart (expand)
  • The gauge cluster: four needles under a glass window on the top plate showing focused distance at the left, aperture at the right, frame number at the top and exposure compensation at the bottom — an analogue watch movement doing the work an LCD does on every rival
  • A collar around the shutter release selecting (P)rogram, (A)perture-priority and (T)ime, with a thumbwheel behind it setting the aperture, the manual focus distance or program shift
  • A titanium shell over a reinforced polycarbonate chassis; the lens barrel, focusing helicoid and film guide rails are aluminium
  • Frame lines projected into the finder by LCD and lit through a translucent window above the flash, or by a bulb when the light is short
  • A custom-function menu entered by code, which among other things allows the gauge needles to be re-zeroed when they drift out of alignment

Nikon 35Ti Quartz Date:

  • Champagne chrome titanium; the 28Ti that followed is black, and that is the fastest way to tell them apart across a room
  • Flash mode set by momentary pushbuttons rather than the 28Ti's sliding switch
  • A 35mm f/2.8 Nikkor of six elements in four groups, against seven in five on the 28Ti

Serial-range notes

5xxxxxx
Japanese-market cameras. A Japanese Nikon specialist writing in 2007 records that domestic 35Ti bodies almost all carry numbers beginning with 5.
US4xxxxx
The US-market block. The same source notes that some of these were later sold in Japan too, so a US4 camera with a Japanese manual is not an import anomaly but a documented arrangement — and a US4 prefix on its own does not establish where a camera was sold.

Specifications

Format
24×36mm on 35mm film, with a 36×13mm panorama crop mode
Finder
Direct-vision finder using an aspheric element to hold distortion down, with LCD-projected illuminated frame lines and parallax marks · 0.5× magnification · 85% coverage · no rangefinder image
Shutter
leaf, electronically controlled, programmed · 2 s – 1/500, plus a Time mode running up to 10 minutes · self-timer
Film advance
motorised; automatic loading, advance and rewind
Back
hinged, non-interchangeable, with quartz date and time imprinting
Meter
Silicon photodiode, six-segment 3D matrix or 75/25 centre-weighted, selected by custom function. Program and aperture-priority automatic exposure with ±2 EV of compensation — in half steps on English Wikipedia's figures and in thirds on the Modern Classic Nikon Series page. Film speed by DX code, ISO 25–5000 in third steps.
Weight
312 g
Dimensions
118 × 66 × 36 (Japanese sources); English Wikipedia gives 117 × 67 × 37 mm
Country
Japan
Original price
125,000 yen, body, excluding tax, at the December 1993 launch. The 28Ti that followed in September 1994 was 135,000 yen. Contemporary American writing puts the 35Ti at about $1,000 on the street; Mike Eckman's documented US figure — a $1,220 list against a $950–1,000 street price in March 1995 — is for the 28Ti, and no equally firm US list price for the 35Ti has been found here. (today ¥142,000)
Accessories
Limited-edition leather 'antique' case, September 1994, 3,000 made · Quartz date and time imprinting, built in — not an optional back

Magnification and coverage from the Modern Classic Nikon Series specification page, which gives 0.5× and about 85 per cent at −1 dioptre for the 35Ti against 0.35× and about 82 per cent for the 28Ti. Phillip Reeve's review complains of visible barrel distortion in it, and of frame lines that vanish indoors because they are lit from above.

Where sources disagree

Autofocus resolution
  • 833 steps (English Wikipedia's infobox for both Ti bodies; the Modern Classic Nikon Series page, which calls it "833-step Autofocus" and "stepless and more precise than any previous active-infrared autofocus system")
  • 541 steps (Mike Eckman's specification table, drawn from period Popular Photography; and Cameras By Max, which attaches 541 to the 35Ti specifically)

Better supported: Unresolved

Both camps give the same minimum focus, 0.4 m, so this is not two different focusing systems being described. The obvious escape — that 833 belongs to one body and 541 to the other — does not survive contact with the sources: Wikipedia's 833 covers both cameras and Cameras By Max's 541 is stated of the 35Ti. Nikon's own surviving material does not give a step count at all, so there is nothing to check either number against.

Who built the analogue gauge movement
  • Timex (Cameras By Max, stated flatly: "The top display on the camera was designed by Timex, the watch company")
  • Seiko (Digital Camera World, which reports it as "reportedly made by legendary Japanese watchmaker, Seiko, although such claims are unverified")
  • No outside firm named — CAPA's Japanese history says only that the display applies the mechanism of an analogue clock

Better supported: Neither

One source says an American watch company, another says a Japanese one and marks its own claim unverified, and the Japanese camera press names nobody. Nikon has not said. This is the single most repeated piece of 35Ti folklore and it currently has no evidence behind it in either direction.

End of production
  • September 1997 (a Japanese Nikon specialist, giving 56,000 sold from December 1993)
  • Still current in November 1999 (Mike Eckman, citing that month's Popular Photography round-up, which listed both the 35Ti and the 28Ti)
  • "Around 2000" (the figure commonly repeated in English writing on the camera)

Better supported: Unresolved

Being listed in a magazine's current-models table is evidence of stock, not of a production line. The two claims are reconcilable if Nikon built the camera until 1997 and sold it down for two more years, but nobody says so, and the difference decides whether the 35Ti had a four-year run or a seven-year one.

What reviewers say

History

Every luxury compact of the early 1990s tells the photographer what it is doing on a liquid-crystal panel. The 35Ti tells them with four needles. Under a glass window on the top plate sits a gauge cluster built on an analogue clock movement: distance at the left, aperture at the right, frame number at the top, exposure compensation at the bottom, all swinging into place as the camera thinks. It is the only reason most people can name this camera, and Nikon thought about it hard enough to hide a custom function in the menu that re-zeroes the needles when they drift out of alignment — which is to say the company knew from the start that a mechanical movement in a pocket camera would eventually go out of true.

Who actually made that movement is not known. One British dealer’s review states flatly that the display was designed by Timex; Digital Camera World reports it as “reportedly” made by Seiko and says in the same sentence that the claim is unverified; the Japanese camera press describes the mechanism and names nobody. Nikon has never said. It is the most-repeated fact about the 35Ti and it is not a fact.

What Nikon has said is where the lens came from. The 35mm f/2.8 is six elements in four groups, symmetrical, using low-dispersion glass, and in the first installment of “NIKKOR — The Thousand and One Nights” — the essay about the Nikkor-O 2.1cm f/4, a rangefinder lens of 1959 — Haruo Sato names it directly as a later development of the symmetrical wide-angle type invented by Zenji Wakimoto. Wakimoto designed S- and F-mount Nikkors and created the Micro-Nikkors; he is also the man who inherited the 8.5cm f/1.5 from Murakami Saburo and finished it. He died in 1996, three years after this camera reached the market. When reviewers noticed the 35Ti looked like a 1950s Nikon rangefinder, a company spokesman answered that “the designers of [the 35Ti] are somewhat younger than the designers of the S2” — which is a denial of one connection and, read against the essay, an admission of a deeper one.

The camera underneath is a titanium shell over a reinforced polycarbonate chassis, with aluminium for the lens barrel, the focusing helicoid and the film guide rails. It focuses by active infrared from 0.4 metres, meters on six-segment 3D matrix or 75/25 centre-weighted, runs a leaf shutter from 2 seconds to 1/500 with a Time mode that will hold ten minutes, and reads DX codes from ISO 25 to 5000. Dan Richards, testing it for Popular Photography against the Contax T2 and the Konica Hexar, gave the optical verdict to the Nikon and called the lens “an SLR-quality optic, and a good SLR optic at that”. Phillip Reeve, shooting one thirty years later, agrees about the lens and disagrees about everything else: slow and unpredictable autofocus, barrel distortion in the finder, frame lines that disappear indoors.

Three numbers on this camera are contested and one of them matters. The autofocus is quoted at 833 steps by Wikipedia and by the Modern Classic Nikon Series specification page, and at 541 by Mike Eckman and by Cameras By Max — with the same 0.4 m minimum focus on both sides, so the tidy explanation that one figure belongs to the 35Ti and the other to the 28Ti does not hold. Nikon gives no step count at all. The production span is quoted as ending in 1997, in 1999 and “around 2000”. And the production total exists in exactly one place: a Japanese blog on older Nikons, which says roughly 56,000 were sold between December 1993 and September 1997, against 17,000 for the 28Ti between September 1994 and June 1996. Nikon has published nothing. That single unofficial figure is the only thing in print that answers the question a buyer actually asks — how many are there — and it comes with the writer’s own verdict attached: that for all the titanium and all the needles, the 35Ti was commercially a disappointment, arriving after the Contax T2 and the GR1 had already taken the conversation. It also comes with the writer’s own disclaimer. The blog’s masthead asks readers to take what it says 「話半分」程度に, at half value, and the post cites nothing — not a Nikon document, not a method, not another source. A number that specific, published in 2007 about a camera stopped in the 1990s, is either someone’s genuine access to a distribution record or someone’s memory. There is no way to tell which, and the correct thing to do with it is print it, print where it came from, and refuse to round it into a fact.

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This history is AI-written, from the sources listed at the foot of the page. Where the record is silent it says so rather than filling the gap — but no human wrote these sentences.

Example photos

Sample photo taken with the Nikon 35Ti
Nikon 35Ti — John Nuttall from Hampshire, United Kingdom, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
Sample photo taken with the Nikon 35Ti
Nikon 35Ti, top plate: the analogue dials — chia ying Yang, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
Sample photo taken with the Nikon 35Ti
Mercato Coperto, Ancona — shot on a Nikon 35Ti (Davide Toccaceli) — Davide Toccaceli, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Sample photo wanted — shot with a Nikon 35Ti? We'd love to feature it (with credit).

Live listings

Asking price, USD: a median of $1,000 across 29 fixed-price listings on 2026-09-11 (middle half $900–$1,100). Tracked since 2026-09-06, 3 days: unchanged from $1,000.

By day
DateMedianMiddle halfListings
2026-09-11$1,000$900–$1,10029
2026-09-08$1,000$900–$1,10028
2026-09-06$1,000$900–$1,10029

Asking prices from the listings scanned, not sales; junk-flagged rows and auction lots excluded; other currencies are not converted.

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Listings updated 2026-09-11. Links go to the shop or marketplace that carries the item.

Sources (14)

Every page here is assembled from public sources, and the gaps are real ones. If you own this camera, know a serial number I'm missing, or can see where I have it wrong, tell me — corrections, serials and sample photos are all worth having.