Nikon QV-1000C (1988)
The QV-1000C is one of the strangest and rarest cameras Nikon ever built. It is an analog black-and-white still video camera, not a digital camera, and it was developed only for the press. It was never sold to general users. Nikon announced it August 26, 1988, the same year as the F4, and designed it to share that camera's operating system as closely as possible, since Nikon expected both to be used at the same news spot. Only 180 units were produced.
Instead of film, the QV-1000C recorded analog video signals onto a magnetic 2-inch still video floppy disk. The sensor was a 380,000-pixel CCD. Shutter speeds ran from 1/8 to 1/2000 sec, with ISO from 400 to 1600. The camera did not use the F-mount. It had a smaller, specialized electronic mount, with two dedicated QV Nikkor lenses developed for it (a 10-40mm F1.4 and an ED 11-120mm F2). A QM-100 adapter allowed regular F-mount Nikkor lenses to be used in manual focus. The system was sold as a complete kit - body, two lenses, the QV-1010T transmitter, battery and charger in a carrying case. The transmitter was required to view images on a TV or transmit them by phone line. The camera weighed 1.5 kg with its standard lens.
The QV-1000C won a Good Design Award in 1989. Its price exceeded $15,000, which fits a professional press camera with a tiny production run. Nikon listed it in Germany until at least 1993. The black-and-white-only design was deliberate. Color still video cameras of the era couldn't produce image quality acceptable for newspaper reproduction, so monochrome was the solution. Surviving documentation is thin, and no battery specs or detailed viewfinder information have surfaced in the research. It was Nikon's first filmless camera.
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