Maybe that title will get some eyeballs...
I happened to be holding a 200mm Nikkor-M and a 150mm Rodenstock APO-Sironar today and noticed that the order of the speeds is opposite for the two shutters. On one, speeds increase clockwise, on the other it's counterclockwise. My 90mm Nikkor-SW is the same direction as the Nikkor-M, another Rodenstock and a Schneider lens are opposite the Nikkors. These are all the original shutters for the lenses concerned. Basically, the Nikkors go one way, everyone else goes the other way.
I'd heard that Nikkors always came in "special" Copal shutters, which I thought just meant the body band (making it difficult to put new scales on one of their shutters). But it seems the special-ness extends to the innards as well. Other than being different, what's the point? It seems to me it would just drive up the cost of shutters to Nikon because their volume certainly would have been less than all other users combined. Unless Nikon owned Copal.
Any ideas as to the rationale behind this? Is it physically possible to use all the same internal bits and simply assemble the shutter upside-down? The release mechanisms work in the same direction, so it's not a complete mirror image.
Sign me..
.. puzzled
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