The Nikon FG-20


Nikon's sole new offering in 1984 is fascinating not as an example of the camera builder's art but as a statement of the direction in which camera development was going in the middle of the eighties.

When, in the mid-seventies, Canon had introduced the plastic shelled, all electronic AE-1, they had effectively re-defined the mass market for 35mm SLR cameras. Over the next few years the market fragmented into three distinct areas. At the top, and offering the highest unit profit if you could stay the course, was the professional and advanced amateur market. This was basically sliced up by Canon and Nikon with Leica, Minolta, Olympus and Pentax sharing what few crumbs the big boys dropped.
Next came the main amateur market where, traditionally, the manufacturers made lower unit profits but far greater net profits because this was basically where they sold the most cameras. Here, all the main manufacturers fought for market share, with the members of the top table trading on their reputations and the rest sniping hard on price.

What Canon's introduction of the AE-1 had done was to unlock a whole new market below this. Now there was a high specification camera that could be bought and used by people who wanted to take pictures of their families and their holiday spots.

Traditionally, this part of the market had bought the relatively cheap rangefinder offerings from Minolta, Yashica and Canon themselves. The East Germans and the Soviets had spotted this niche early on, selling tens of thousands of cheap and usually nasty SLRs across Europe and even in the prosperous U.S.A.

Eastern Invasion

The Japanese charged into the low end market with a will. The AE1 was joined by Pentax's ME, Olympus's OM10 and Nikon's EM, all lightweight cameras in every sense. These cameras were intended to sell on price and little else, though it helped a lot if you had a high quality prestigous lens range to boast about in your sales literature. Interestingly, only Nikon carried the concept to its logical conclusion, introducing a budget lens range to go with the EM.

By the mid 'eighties, the big players were even bigger and both Canon and Nikon often appeared to the casual observer as loose federations of design teams and marketing groups rather than integrated organisations. Their product ranges expanded at an alarming rate and the public must have found it difficult to know what to make of the line-up.

Into this confused and confusing picture slipped the FG-20. Nikon had introduced the FG as an up-market variant of the EM but sales appear to have been disappointing. The EM's customer base was unimpressed by the apparent complexity of the controls while more traditional Nikon customers could see little to please them in the FG's build quality. Exactly what Nikon thought the punters would make of a cheapened FG is anyone's guess but the final answer from the market was 'not a lot'.

Mostly Harmless

To be fair, compared with its oppositon the FG-20 isn't that bad. It's reasonably well put together but so small that holding it is something of a problem for the experienced SLR user - at whom it was emphatically not aimed. The viewfinder isn't too bad though it has poor eye relief, which makes it something of a nuisance for anyone who wears spectacles. There's a split image rangefinder spot in the middle of the screen which is a great help because the rest of the screen's a pain to focus on. Everything's where you'd expect it to be and the shutter, though not quiet, is less noisy than some.

The FG-20 is, basically, well, basic. And that's the point. The FG-20 and its competitors weren't aimed at the clued-up user. Its market was the person who, ten years previously, would have bought a Canonet or a Minolta Hi-matic. In those terms, does it succeed? Well, up to a point, Lord Copper.

Illustrative

The FG-20 illustrates the problem faced by camera manufacturers in the middle of the 'eighties. They knew there was a market to be found for cheap SLRs but they were unsure of exactly how to go about satisfying it. So they cast about, trying this and that, in the hope of finding the magic formula. The prevailing business wisdom seems to have been: Canon did it with the AE1, so why can't we?

In the course of this search many things were tried most of which, ultimately, reflected each company's corporate view of the market. In the event, the big winners were those who married their unique view of camera design to the consumer's craving for originality. In the end result, the three big winners were Canon, Olympus and Pentax, each of whom brought something different to the market and were able to marry low pricing to a perception of quality.

Not Only but Also

Not only the camera manufacturers were having a problem understanding the market. The independent lens makers were finding it every bit as confusing and they too sometimes appeared to be throwing everything and anything at the wall, in the hope that something would stick. The FG-20 shown here is fitted with a Vivitar 70~210 Series one zoom of the same period. This is not, however, the famous lens which, in the 'seventies, had redefined the independent lens market. It is instead a somewhat cheaper and blander design than its predecessor which, like the FG-20, was a shameless attempt to cash in on the mystique of past glories.

Vivitar, famously, did not make the products bearing their name. Instead they designed a lens and called for tenders to make it. At one time or another, most of the best Japanese optical houses had produced lenses for Vivitar and the partnership had been a successful one, with Vivitar's designs selling sufficiently well as to engender responses from the camera manufacturers in the form of lowered prices. Nikon had been one of the companies most directly affected by Vivitar. In the UK, a major retailer claimed that, at the height of their popularity, Vivitar lenses were out-selling Nikkors two to one in the important press and journalism sector.

A Dangerous Place

By the time of the FG-20's launch, the independent lens business was an altogether more dangerous place than it had been ten years previously, with the big camera manufacturers defending their market share with decidedly aggressive pricing. The independents could either compete on quality or on price - at the margins available, even Vivitar could no longer do both. Vivitar decided it had done what it could on the quality front, so now it went for pricing even more aggressive than that of the camera manufacturers. The result was a range of lenses which were astonishingly well priced but which were just about good enough.

Like the FG-20, this turned out not to be quite what the market really wanted and Vivitar's market share, in the UK at least,  declined swiftly. The lesson, which Nikon learned but. sadly, Vivitar did not, was that you had to have a lot of money in your pocket if you wanted to compete on price because, in the end analysis, price was not the only thing it was about.

Nikon had drawn the wrong lessons from its early success with the EM. They ultimately failed in the low end market and the bland design of the FG-20 shows why. It was a competetently executed camera that would hardly have been ground-breaking in 1974 and in 1984 was far too little, far too late. After the FG-20, Nikon withdrew from the bottom end until they launched the Cosina derived FM10 and FE10 cameras which were, in the event, just what the market wanted.

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