Am I alone in having such strong tactile preferences that they guide purchase decisions for me? In the world of threaded cable releases, one—the Nikon AR-3 Threaded Cable Release—stands alone, not for its diverse functionality or plethora of technological capabilities—they all do the exact same thing—but simply because of the way it feels.
Growing up, before I was a photographer, Dad was the family shooter and he had a cable release for his Leica. It worked well enough, and, knowing Dad, it was, if not a made-in-Germany piece of precision engineering, an actual Leica-branded cable release that cost a lot more than the competitions’. However, I never remember the actuation of the mechanism feeling good to my fingers.
For years, with my Nikon N6006, I used a generic release. Those years were OK, but, you know, the generic cable release didn’t make my annual summary of “things that felt good.”
Somehow, somewhere, I got my hands on the Nikon AR-3 threaded release and experienced tactile bliss. How good is this release? Well, is the fact that I owned one while I was shooting digital cameras that did not accept a cable release an indication of its tactile amazingness? Or does it just prove that I am crazy?
Seventy-two five-star reviews at press time. I wonder if any of those photographers own one, even though they don’t have a compatible camera? For years, Nikon digital cameras never accepted the threaded AR-3. Even most modern Pentax, Sony, Nikon, Canon, Panasonic, Sigma, and Olympus cameras, among others, could not accept an AR-3, or any other threaded release.
Fast-forward a few years and look who, besides Leica, figured out how to make a threaded shutter release weatherproof? Fujifilm did. The X-T2 has a threaded release following in the steps of the X100 series, X-Pro1 and X-Pro2; all of which took threaded releases.
Now my Nikon AR-3 has graduated from its position as a photographic fidget spinner to an actual tool that gets to ride around in my camera bag and release some shutters—along with a lot of just-for-fun actuations!
The “Things We Love” series articles are written by B&H Photo Video Pro Audio staff to talk about products and items that we love. Opinions expressed in the articles are those of the writers and do not represent product endorsements from B&H Photo Video Pro Audio.