Nikon M

The Nikon M is what a company builds when it cannot afford the camera it wants. Nippon Kogaku finished the prototype in July 1949, discontinued the Nikon I that same month at 738 units, and reconfigured the whole of the unsold I inventory into the new model. The problem it was solving was American: the Nikon I’s 24×32mm frame was fed seven perforations at a time, and the automatic colour-slide cutters used in the United States were built for the Leica pitch of eight. Widening the gate to a true 24×36mm meant remodelling the body castings, and Nikon’s own history is unusually blunt that this was simply beyond the company’s means. So it changed the feed rather than the frame — eight perforations, the same as a Leica — and left the gate at whatever the existing shutter travel allowed, which came to 34mm. The letter was an accounting mark. Top plates had already been cut for the Nikon I, and an M was engraved ahead of the existing serial for no better reason than to tell a 24×32 body from a 24×34 one on the shelf. Medium, for the size between Leica and Nikon format; the alphabetical step from L to N; Modified — all three readings are in print, none is sourced to the factory, and the only mechanical account of the letter requires it to abbreviate nothing at all.

The compromise reached deeper into the camera than the arithmetic suggests. Nikon’s own Camera Chronicle records a detail almost nobody repeats: there was not enough room inside the shutter, so the frame was at first widened asymmetrically, which left the centre of the picture and the axis of the lens no longer coincident. Nikon’s own analogy for the effect is the shifting control of a PC-Nikkor. To a small degree, an M’s negatives are shifted, and the asymmetry was corrected only when the shutter was redesigned for the S2. That the resulting format was strange is easy to underestimate now, because it was strange at the time too: the 1951 edition of the Japanese photographic yearbook カメラ年刊 introduced the Nikon M with its frame size given as Leica format, 24×36mm. A period document is not automatically a reliable one, and this particular camera has been getting its defining specification misprinted since it was current.

In the hand the M borrows from both of the cameras it was built against. The shutter is Leica ancestry — horizontal-travel cloth, rubberised habutae silk, T and B and 1 second to 1/500, set on a two-tier coaxial dial that you lift and turn after winding, with the top dial parked on the 20-1 index before the lower one reaches the slow speeds. Almost everything else is Contax thinking: a bayonet mount, two baseplate locking lugs, and a back that comes off altogether, the hinged-looking door on it being decorative. Film advances by knob, the frame counter is reset by hand, and rewinding is a knob with an A–R lever; the crank arrived only with the S2. Focus is a wheel under the right index finger driving a helical built into the body, with an automatic infinity lock and two separate releases for it — and because the helical lives in the camera, most of the 50mm lenses have no focusing mount of their own and seat on an inner bayonet, while wides, teles and the reflex housing use an outer one. The finder is a single window, reversed Galilean, showing the 50mm field and nothing else: no bright lines, no other focal length, so a Variframe 35–135 finder in the shoe was not an accessory but a necessity. There is no meter, no self-timer and no motor drive. How well it focused a fast lens is a question the record cannot answer, because no published source gives the M a rangefinder base length at all — the 60mm that circulates belongs to the Nikon I — and Nikon itself later listed the 0.6× magnification among the shortcomings addressed in the design of the S2.

Then, in the spring of 1950, it was pointed out in the United States that the camera lacked flash synchronisation, and the answer to that complaint is where the M stops being a single camera. Two contacts, S for slow bulbs and F for fast, went onto the left shoulder from November 1950, thrown by the movement of the shutter’s front curtain and fed by a two-post terminal rather than a PC cord. Nikon released the result in December as the Nikon S. American collectors did not follow: they kept calling it a Synced M, because it still said M on the top plate. Japanese collectors and the factory read it the other way — an early S, or an MS — and McKeown’s records that Nippon Kogaku counted any sync-equipped body as a Nikon S whatever the engraving said. The serial numbers refuse to settle the argument. Three published estimates put the transition in three different places — at around M6092350, at M6092462, and as low as M6091958 — and both Pacific Rim Camera and the Kyoto dealer MediaJoy state that there was never a clean boundary to find: the changeover was staged and cameras were not assembled in serial order. The production figures look like a contradiction and probably are not. Roughly 1,600 covers the unsynchronised camera alone; roughly 3,200 covers both halves; and the 1,649 Mike Eckman gives as the total for every Nikon M ever built is an unsynchronised count wearing the wrong label.

One thing nearly happened to this camera, and one thing quietly did. In March 1950, with the business in poor shape, management ordered a prototype of the M in Leica screw mount, on the reasoning that a difficult bayonet could be dropped and the two lens systems unified at lower cost. The prototype was finished that November, examined, and rejected — partly because the engineers argued that a mount on the market should not be changed lightly, partly because trade had picked up. An M39 Nikon existed, briefly, and was voted down, which is why the S bayonet survived to carry the S2, the SP and the S3. What did happen is that the M, not the I, is where Nikon’s reputation was won. Nippon Kogaku had sought the advice of aircraft laboratories on lubricating oil and run repeated temperature experiments at varied locations, and Nikon’s own Camera Chronicle credits that work — the design for smooth shutter movement, the lubricating technology and other improvements — with paying off particularly during the Korean War. That is how a stopgap built out of leftover top plates ended up in professional hands.