Stories Test

A section being tried out — two kinds of page that are not catalog entries. Buyer's guides pick an entry-level, a best-value and a collector's piece per system, with today's asking prices. Stories are longer pieces built from the catalog's own research, the ones that would not fit in a history section. Both are AI-written from the family pages and say so.

1. 
   One tenth of a stop — 2026-09-10

   Between a navy request in 1943 and a lens four times faster than the eye in 1961, four Japanese optical houses raced each other to the widest aperture in the world — and one of them died of it.

2. 
   The last new rangefinder — 2026-09-10

   In 1994 Kyocera launched the first interchangeable-lens rangefinder system in forty years, gave it autofocus and seven Zeiss lenses, and watched the ground move under it; eleven years later the company left cameras altogether.

3. 
   Six thousand yen — 2026-09-05

   Maitani Yoshihisa was given a price and designed a camera down to it, and the half-frame format followed.

4. 
   Thirty-nine cameras and a workshop that gave up — 2026-09-05

   The only half-frame reflex Nikon ever supplied was a Norwegian police order for an upright identity camera, and Nikon never finished it.

5. 
   The watch-parts maker that put a rangefinder on a reflex — 2026-09-05

   Pignons of Ballaigues built forty thousand Alpas in forty-six years, and almost every one of them was wrong in an interesting way.