Nikon S2

Parts were already being made when Leitz showed the M3 at Photokina in April 1954, and what Nippon Kogaku had on the bench was a camera with a knob wind and a finder short of life size. It delayed the launch by about half a year, rebuilt the finder at 1:1 and replaced the knob with a one-motion lever. Nikon’s own chronicle gives the reason for the finder change without embarrassment — to establish a difference from the M3’s 0.91×. Both changes stuck, so every S2 ever sold has the life-size finder and the lever, and the two things the camera is remembered for are the two it acquired last. Nikon and the most careful Japanese chronicler of the programme do not quite agree on where it had got to before the M3 appeared: the corporate account says the finder had reached approximately 0.9×, the collector site nikomat says 0.8×. The rest of the sequence reads the same in both.

The finder had been in development since 1949, before the Nikon S even shipped. The first prototype put an 84mm base at 0.7× and was dropped twice over — so long a base distorted the design of the camera, and the thing did not perform. A four-step variable-magnification finder covering 35 to 135mm followed in 1951–52 and died of its own weight. From 1953 the team fixed on a 60mm base at life size and built about ten more prototypes around it: 0.8×, 0.89×, some carrying four frames from 50 to 135mm with automatic parallax correction, some with a dioptre adjustment, some with black lines instead of bright ones. Almost none of that shipped. The production S2 shows one frame, for 50mm, an Albada type reflected off a concave surface that could be confined to the edge of the field precisely because nothing else had to be shown there, and it does not shift for parallax, so every other focal length needs an accessory finder on the shoe. What the austerity bought was brightness: a plain full-surface evaporated half-mirror instead of the more elaborate optics of the SP and S3, a double image that holds up in dim light whatever the pupil is doing, and the largest 50mm view of any Nikon rangefinder. The 60mm base is a thinner fact than it looks, mind — one source has it, Nikon’s own specification table does not, and the 60mm effective baselength on this page is that figure multiplied by the magnification rather than anybody’s published number. That gap leaves an old claim standing open: nikomat says the finished S2 came out slightly ahead of the M3 in both magnification and effective baselength. The magnification half is easy, 1.0 against 0.91. The other half will not settle, because none of the sources here gives the M3’s rangefinder base length; camera-wiki prints an effective base of 47.1mm for it at 0.90×, which would put the M3 below the S2, but that figure implies an M3 base of about 52mm and is not one to lean on. Nikon’s own chronicle says only that the effective base length had been increased over the Nikon S, and never mentions the Leica.

Underneath, the S2 is the first Nikon that is not a rebuilt Nikon I. The shell is a light-alloy die-casting in place of the sand-cast bodies of the I, M and S, with the film gate cast into it rather than fitted as a separate part and the tripod bush in the casting rather than in the base plate; the back comes off with one key where the Nikon S needed two, and an S2 back will fit a later SP, S3 or S4 though theirs will not fit an S2. Widening the frame to a full 24×36 forced a new shutter, and holding 1/1000 meant a faster curtain, which rebounded at the end of its travel. Nikon’s answer was a pendulum brake, a weight of the same mass as the curtain, and Nikon’s own chronicle follows that idea forward off the S2 page to the F5, where the same thing is sold as a mirror balancer when a mass brake for a mirror is what it is. The speed series went over to doubling — 1, 2, 4, 8, 15, 30, 60, 125, 250, 500, 1000 — apparently the first Japanese camera to do so, though the account that says so hedges it. The flash socket became the standard German and JIS pattern instead of the Nikon S’s two-prong fitting, with a continuously variable delay selector under the rewind knob and a direct contact added to the shoe. There is no self-timer, whatever the spec tables say.

Two things nearly went another way. Nippon Kogaku seriously considered abandoning its own bayonet for Leica’s M39 screw, on the reasoning that the screw mount was more versatile and that it had made roughly as many L-mount Nikkors as S-mount ones; at least two L-mount prototypes were built before compatibility with the existing lenses won the argument. And the rewind crank, the S2’s most widely copied idea, was not Nikon’s at all: the Japanese record credits it to the photographer Miki Jun (三木淳), calls it a world first, and notes that no patent was filed, so other makers had it within a short time. The same restlessness shows in the winding. A grip-type rapid winder was prototyped around 1953 and killed by the decision to fit a lever; motor work restarted in October 1956, and what came of it was the S2E, a body converted to take a drive in place of its back, shown in Washington in March 1957 at two frames a second on 7.5 volts and three on nine, and on sale that April, half a year ahead of the SP. It is the rarest thing in the S2’s story and the counts do not agree — a two-digit number of bodies and 32 drives in the Japanese record, ten to fifteen bodies with four or five known in one Western account, and no serial numbers at all in any of the sources here.

America took to the camera out of all proportion to Nikon’s standing there. Popular Photography, U.S. Camera and Modern Photography all ran pieces in February 1955, Willoughby’s stocked it, and in June 1955 the Consumers Research Bulletin called it “the world’s finest camera in consideration of the price.” At home it was not a casual purchase: one collector source, hedging its own figures, puts the Japanese launch at ¥83,000 with the 5cm f/1.4 and ¥69,500 with the f/2, against a graduate civil servant’s starting salary of ¥8,700. It sold 56,715 by the figure in Nikon’s house history, or about sixty thousand by Nikon’s own chronicle, and in April 1957, at serial 6180000, the chrome control dials went black. The tell is the chrome rim that appears around the black speed dial, not the black paint itself, and the changeover was not clean: one camera a few hundred numbers early wears a chrome focusing helical with dials painted black over chrome parts and no rim, and the collector who documented it says frankly that he cannot tell a prototype from a very good old conversion. Black-painted bodies are a separate story and a messier one. They exist because a photographer covering the Korean War was shot at over the glare off his chrome and asked for a camera that did not shine; they were listed on a Nikon price sheet but meant for credentialed professionals, so the claim that the S2 was the first Nikon available in black without special order overstates it. How many is unresolved — the published batch lists give 369 on the chrome-dial base and 681 on the black-dial base, an auction house puts one of those batches on the chrome dial instead and counts about 450, and Stephen Gandy reports meeting black chrome-dials about five times as often as black black-dials, which fits neither. All of which is worth knowing before you buy one, since resprays get sold as factory paint. When the run ended is not settled either: 1957, 1958, or June 1958, depending on whom you read, and nothing in the sources here decides it.