Nikon S

The Nikon S is a Nikon M with flash synchronisation added: two contacts, F and S, on the left shoulder. That is the whole mechanical change, and it was enough. American export customers complained in the spring of 1950 that the M could not fire a flash; Nippon Kogaku modified the body to carry an S contact for slow bulbs and an F contact for fast ones, switched production over completely in November, and gave the result a new letter. What the letter bought was a market. Most Nikon I and M output had gone to occupation forces through PX stores, so the S is in practice the first Nikon aimed at civilians, the first imported commercially into the United States, and the body on which the Korean War reputation of Nikkor lenses finally turned into volume. It is the third and last of the 6FB bodies, the family that began with the Nikon I. It is not, whatever you have read elsewhere, the first full-frame Nikon: it kept the M’s non-standard 24×34mm gate to the end.

The Korean War story is usually told in a shape Nippon Kogaku’s own chronicle both confirms and complicates. In June 1950 David Douglas Duncan of LIFE, Horace Bristol of FORTUNE and Miki Jun (三木淳) visited the Ohi plant — but the lens that started it was not the company’s to show off. In Miki’s own account, published in Nikkor Club Quarterly in 1963, a photographer named Murai Ryuichi turned up at the LIFE office carrying an unfamiliar 85mm f/2 Nikkor. Miki borrowed it, photographed Duncan with it, and said “This is Japanese Sonnar”; Duncan laughed back “Oh, Japanese Sonnar. Where’s a Japanese Cadillac?” Then he looked at the picture, his expression changed, and he asked whose product it was. What followed went to the older bodies. Nippon Kogaku recoupled an 8.5cm f/2 and a 13.5cm f/3.5 to Contax mount for Carl Mydans in July 1950 — the first Nikkors in Contax mount — Hank Walker went to Korea with his camera changed to a Nikon M, and the JCII Camera Museum records that the M was what most LIFE photographers first took up. Jacob Deschin’s New York Times piece of 10 December 1950, the very week the S was announced, reported the sensation among American picture magazines. So the cameras that earned the reputation were Is and Ms. The S is the one that cashed it: Nikon’s own ledger runs 2,533 cameras in the financial year to March 1951, then 5,462, then 8,274, then 12,873 — 29,142 in four years, export ahead of domestic every year — with monthly output past 500 by the end of 1951 and past 1,000 in June 1953, the year Joe Ehrenreich, with Herbert Sax and Joseph K. Abbot, reached an agreement with Nippon Kogaku and began importing the S and the fast Nikkors into the United States.

Almost everything about when it appeared is contested, including inside Nikon’s chronicle, which says in one place that the camera was released in December 1950 and in another that it was released at the end of 1950. The fullest account separates the three events that got compressed: production beginning in 1950, a simultaneous Japanese and American announcement on 10 December 1950, and sale from January 1951. Western references date it uniformly to early 1951 and put the end of manufacture at 1954, though Serrano counts sales through 1955 — both can be true, since the S2 was completed in August 1954 and only announced that December. The frame is less negotiable. Nippon Kogaku states 24×34mm three separate times, and gives a mechanical reason: there was not enough room inside the shutter for a wider gate, so the frame was widened asymmetrically instead, shifting the centre of the picture away from the lens axis in a way the company itself likened to the movement of the later PC-Nikkor. Redesigning the shutter is what let the S2 reach 24×36mm. en.wikipedia says flatly that the reluctance “is not fully understood”; the manufacturer’s account is specific and names its own cure. The S2 redesign changed how the body was made as well. The S and the two bodies before it were sand-cast aluminium — Serrano’s verdict on the result is that it is built like a tank — and the S2 moved to die casting, with a large saving in weight.

The finder is the thing to understand before buying one. A single window does both jobs, Contax-fashion, and it works at 0.6× — a reduction, not life size. There are no bright-line frames at all: the field corresponds roughly to a 50mm lens and you compose to the edge the finder’s own front frame cuts, which at that magnification reads clearly enough to work with. What the reduction costs is rangefinder accuracy. The Nikon I’s 60mm base carries over unchanged — no source publishes a base length for the S itself — and at 0.6× that gives an effective baselength of about 36mm, against 58mm on the SP. Nikon lists the 0.6× magnification alongside excessive weight and a form that made mass production difficult as the three complaints that forced the S2, and the search for a replacement had begun in 1949, before the S was even on sale: an 84mm-base 0.7× prototype was dropped because so long a base affected the camera’s design too much and performed poorly anyway, a four-step 35–135mm variable-magnification finder was researched in 1951–52 and abandoned on weight, and from 1953 the 60mm-at-1× arrangement that became the S2’s was studied — carrying the first Albada bright-line mechanism Nikon ever fitted.

Two of the things the S started outlived it by decades. The first is black paint: Nikon states that on the strength of what the LIFE photographers went through in Korea, a black-finished body was made to cut the light reflections that others could spot, and that this was the first black Nikon of any kind. ja.wikipedia is blunter about why, saying a war photographer was sniped at because of the glare off his chrome plating, and that the black S2 was added to the catalogue precisely because of this custom job on the S. Nobody publishes how many were built; one serial, 6108685, is all that survives in print, and the auction-catalogue line about LIFE requesting twenty of them is labelled a legend by the auctioneer who prints it. The second is Miki Jun again — a rewind crank was fitted to his own Nikon S at his suggestion, adopted on the S2, and, no patent having been applied for, copied by rivals soon afterwards. And then there is Capa. The JCII Camera Museum states institutionally that the Nikon S is the type Robert Capa last held. Mainichi invited him to Japan in April 1954, Nippon Kogaku used the visit to hand him five bodies and fifteen lenses, LIFE’s picture editor then diverted him to Indochina to relieve Howard Sochurek, and the camera itself, with a Nikkor S.C 5cm f/1.4 on it, was displayed at the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum in 2024. He was carrying a Contax IIa as well, and made the last picture of his life on that one. The serial number of the Nikon S and its present custodian are published nowhere — and neither, for a camera this thoroughly documented, is what one cost new, in any currency at all.