Nikon: NIKKOR — The Thousand and One Nights

Nikon describes NIKKOR — The Thousand and One Nights as a serial history of NIKKOR lens design and manufacture. Its current English series index contains 99 tales, ranging from famous production lenses to enlarging optics, compact-camera lenses, accessories, and unusual experiments.

Nikon does not display a publication date on the current index or individual English tale pages. Consequently, no dates have been inferred here. The list follows Nikon's numbered publication sequence, newest tale first.

Tale 74 distinguishes the original 1989 S version from its 1993 D update, which added an absolute distance encoder; the catalog link points to that D version. Tale 32 likewise covers the original AF DC 135mm f/2S of 1991, and the catalog link points to its later D version. Tale 22 illustrates both the COOLPIX 4300 lens and the COOLPIX SQ lens, so both are linked with their roles identified.

Nikon Research Reports

Nikon's corporate Research Report series includes three detailed papers devoted to the development of NIKKOR Z lenses. These complement the more narrative Thousand and One Nights tales with discussions of optical targets, mechanisms, manufacturing, and evaluation.

Frontiers of Vision

Frontiers of Vision is a Nikon corporate history series in which WIRED Japan's editorial team revisits products Nikon regards as epoch-making. It is deliberately broader than the lens collections above: its ten installments cover binoculars, a microscope, a film scanner, a profile projector, underwater and digital cameras, and two subjects that are directly optical. Only those two name a specific NIKKOR lens, so the catalog column here is sparse by the series' nature rather than by omission.

Nikon prints a year alongside each installment number, so the years below are the manufacturer's own and are not inferred.

The 1971 installment describes a 1965 NASA request for an ultra-wide 220° lens and the Fisheye-Nikkor 6mm f/5.6 that answered it; the catalog holds that 220° design. The 1964 installment covers the Ultra Micro-NIKKOR 29.5mm f/1.2 photomask objective, which the catalog holds as its 1/25× reduction design.

Additional NIKKOR Technology and Design Stories

Two other Nikon corporate features document how lenses are evaluated and how the Z system's industrial design was developed.