Nikon S3M

The Nikon S3M is not a half-frame camera that happens to take a motor drive. It is a motor drive that required a new camera. By 1957 Nikon had an electric drive running the SP at about three frames a second, and then it met a limit no amount of motor could get past: what the motor has to drag past the gate is a full 24 × 36mm frame’s worth of film, every time, and film has mass. Rather than build a faster transport, Nikon shortened the trip. Its own Camera Chronicle says so without a trace of embarrassment — “In order to shorten the time required for film advancement and give the user the quickest possible rate, Nikon reduced the image size from 24 × 36mm to half-size.” The result was an S3 with half a gate, 72 exposures on an ordinary 36-exposure cassette, 195 of them built across 1960 and 1961: among the rarest Nikon rangefinders, and the last new rangefinder design the company produced.

The motor came first and it came in stages. Nikon showed a motorised S2, the S2E, at the International Photo Exhibition in March 1957 and sold it from April; Nippon Kogaku’s own company history records that just 32 drives were built for it, that they interchange with the later S-36, and that S2E bodies themselves number only two figures — which, if that count is right, makes the camera that started all this rarer still than the S3M. The S-36 proper arrived alongside the SP in September 1957 at roughly three frames a second, with a subtractive counter set from 1 to 36 to show frames remaining, serials running 94001 to about 950xx, three successive battery packs — a grey metal tin holding six penlight cells, a brown leather case for six type C, and a grey vinyl version last — and a camera that had to go through a service centre before it would take one. The S-72 for the S3M is the end of that line, most visibly in a counter graduated to 72, and Nippon Kogaku’s period advertising put it at ¥50,000 with its battery case, the same as the company’s motors for the F. Nobody publishes an S-72 serial range; the two numbers on record, 95025 and 95155, sit at and just above the top of the published S-36 block, which is at least consistent with the motors having carried on in the same numbering. How fast the pair actually ran is the one thing about this camera that nothing settles. Nikon’s two modern pages say about six frames a second, Nikon’s own 1960 price list says four, Japanese Wikipedia says six with nine available by adjustment, CameraQuest says a blazing nine, and Pacific Rim Camera says twelve.

The camera under the motor is more interesting than “an S3 with a smaller hole” suggests, but only just, and that is the point. Rather than design a half-frame finder, Nikon took the S3’s life-size unit and made its three frames selectable instead of permanent: a click-stopped chrome lever beside the eyepiece brings up 3.5cm, 5cm or 10.5cm on its own, white and standing upright to match the portrait gate, with parallax marks and the focal length printed below the frame. The irony is that the only frameline selector in the whole S3 line went into the one nobody could buy — the author of shiura.com, complaining that the S3’s three permanent frames clutter each other, writes that what he wants is the S3 made switchable by something as simple as the S3M’s mechanism. Everything else is inherited, and thinly documented with it: the shutter speeds and the 1/60 flash sync are nowhere stated for the S3M directly, and rest entirely on the 1960 price list’s flat assurance that “Other features are the same as the Nikon S3”. Gandy’s observation, and it is the one that explains the whole object, is that the shutter curtains behind that half-frame gate are still full 24 × 36 size: for a run this small, masking and re-gearing an existing camera was the only thing that made sense, and tooling a genuinely small body never came into it. The film counter gives the game away in the other direction — it does not move for a single exposure and then jumps two when the second one is taken.

What the record will not do is settle the basic numbers. Nikon cannot agree with itself on the size of the frame: two of its modern pages say 17.5 × 24mm, which is the true cine half-frame dimension, while its own 1978 company history and its own 1960 price list say 18 × 24, which is what the auction catalogues have said ever since. The dates come in four incompatible accounts, of which three reconcile if April 1960 was the catalogue introduction and the cameras were actually built in two batches, August 1960 and October 1961. The chrome-to-black ratio is either fifty-fifty or fifty out of 195, depending on whether you take Rotoloni through CameraQuest or Grays of Westminster, and no serial separates the finishes; CameraQuest’s serial block runs thirty numbers past where a sequential count of 195 would end. What the M stands for is not settled either — Grays says flatly that it meant the camera was designed for motorised use, while Pacific Rim Camera argues for Microscope, pointing at Nikon’s later M-35 microscope cameras, at how much microscope work is shot half-frame, and at the fact that the S3 was a motorised camera already. And a good deal is simply not there. No source names anyone who designed it. No weight or dimension was ever published for the S3M, and the S3’s own depth disagrees between Nikon’s specification sheet and Wikipedia, so there is not even a clean figure to carry across. Nor was the body’s price ever established: the ¥50,000 motor is the only number the advertising gives.

The people who bought them were press photographers — camera.jp says the model came about at the request of the news field — which is why the survivors are mostly worn, and why clean examples are scarce even against a figure as small as 195. The trade story that best catches what happened next comes from the Tokyo dealer Arrow Camera, writing in 2008 about something that had happened nearly twenty years earlier: a man came up from Shikoku with a complete black outfit, body, motor and three lenses, after several Tokyo shops declined to price it seriously; Arrow paid a little over his ¥700,000 asking price and passed it on to a shop in Kabukicho, where it sat in the window for months because everyone who came in wanted to handle it and nobody wanted to buy it, until the exasperated owner took it out of the display and eventually sold it abroad. Word came back later that a similar full set had made several million yen at an overseas auction. That is now the ordinary shape of the market, and it turns on the motor: Rotoloni, through Grays, reckons only about a hundred complete sets ever existed, so a camera and its S-72 together are worth far more than the two apart. A Tokyo dealer’s asking price, listed through camera.jp, is ¥7,560,000 for a body with its S-72 and a 5cm f/1.4; a complete outfit was listed on eBay at $59,130 in 2019; and at the 43rd Leitz Photographica Auction the chrome 6600156 with its matching motor and a black 5cm f/1.4 was estimated at €32,000 to €36,000, and did not sell.