Nikon S4

Nikon built the S4 to fight a price war and brought a features scalpel to a manufacturing fight. Canon’s P had arrived with a 50mm f/1.8 at ¥47,700, against ¥86,000 for the Nikon S3 and ¥98,000 for the SP, both with the 5cm f/1.4, and Nikon’s answer was to take the S3 and remove four things: the 3.5cm frameline, the self-timer, the automatic frame-counter reset and the motor-drive linkage. Nothing that reaches the negative was touched. The SP’s shutter mechanism and its 1/1000 top speed stayed, and so did the flash-sync system, the life-size finder and the fit of the coupled meter — which is the interesting part, because a cheap camera of that period normally loses its top speeds or its meter coupling first, and this one kept both. It went on sale in March 1959. The Nikon F followed in June. Between 5,895 and 5,898 cameras were built before production stopped in July 1960, and Nikon never introduced another full-frame rangefinder.

The trouble was that the Canon P’s price had not come from deleting features. It came from re-tooling: Canon reworked its production methods around the newest mass-production technology available, and Nikon, as CAPA’s history of the camera puts it, did not go that far, so there was a limit to how far the S4’s costs could be brought down. The result is not in doubt — something between 87,875 and about 100,000 Canon Ps against fewer than six thousand S4s — but the number that would let a reader judge how close Nikon actually got is missing. No source found here prints the S4’s own list price, with or without a lens. Every account of the price war quotes the SP, the S3 and the Canon P and then stops, including the one article built entirely around the comparison. English Wikipedia offers a different explanation of the saving, that the S4 used cloth curtains rather than titanium foil, and cites MIR, which makes no such claim; and whether cloth saved anything at all depends on when the S3 being built alongside it got titanium, which nobody agrees on either — Photoethnography says after 1959, shiura.com says only the late SP and the 1965 S3, and MIR says two S3 versions exist without dating either.

Nikon’s own account of where the camera came from contradicts the folklore, and it is worth reading before the folklore. The Camera Chronicle records the internal product numbers: the S3 was 26F1B, the SP 26F2B, and the S4 and the S3M “were both derived from product number 26FB”. In the same passage Nikon denies flatly that the S3 was a de-specified SP — the rumour of lowered viewfinder specifications and a consequent price cut, the company says, was a falsehood — and the earlier design number supports it, a point Japanese Wikipedia concedes even while opening its own S3 entry with the opposite claim. On that telling the S3 is the base of the family, the SP the elaboration, and the S4 a second-order derivative of the baseline rather than the bottom of a trickle-down. Nearly every secondary source has it the other way about: Gandy says the S3 and S4 were built on the SP chassis as an inexpensive alternative, and MIR calls the S3 a simplified SP. Gandy’s own S4 page then offers a third reading that fits the hardware as well as either — with a manually set counter, cloth curtains and a finder descended from the S2’s, it is just as logical to call the S4 an improved S2.

The story that will not go away is that the camera was shaped by David Douglas Duncan, and it rests on one man. Michael Beaucage, a nineteen-year-old US Navy photographer at Atsugi who had bought a Nikon SP at the base exchange and added an S4 as a burner camera for bad weather, arranged a tour of the Nippon Kogaku factory in 1960; a guide noticed the S4 round his neck, and he was taken to an office and introduced to a man who had interviewed Duncan sometime between 1953 and 1955. Duncan’s wants, as relayed to him: a 1:1 finder so he could shoot with both eyes open, the simplest possible framelines — 35mm, 50mm and a short telephoto, 105 being close enough to the 90 he was used to — and no self-timer, which only gets in the way. Beaucage’s account, published by Gandy, has that interview feeding into the S4 as a specialist camera for photojournalists which Nikon then never marketed as one, because the F took all the attention. Two things sit against it. Nikon’s own explanation of why the camera exists is purely commercial and names nobody. And Duncan reportedly asked for a 35mm frameline: the S4 is precisely the model that deletes it.

What is left to identify the camera by is mostly absences — no self-timer lever, two framelines instead of three, a counter you must set yourself, no lug in the baseplate — and chrome, always chrome, with the small corroboration that Japanese Wikipedia prints black-paint serial brackets for the SP and for the S3 and none at all for this one. The export markings are messier than the literature admits. Gandy treats the feet distance scale and the EP-in-a-diamond stamp on the rewind crank as the same thing, the version sold through the American forces exchanges, since the camera never officially left Japan; Flints Auctions, citing Rotoloni’s page 151, sold a feet-scale S4 in November 2021 carrying no EP mark at all and read the absence as making it rarer still. The two attributes travel separately, then, and a page that welds them together will misdescribe real cameras. The serial record is thinner than the published block suggests: 6500000 to 6505900 is the figure in circulation, but only two individual bodies survive checking here — 6505656, the Flints camera, and Gandy’s own 6505922 — one inside the last 250 numbers of that block and the other above its ceiling, alongside the highest number reported to the Nikon Historical Society, 6505928. Nothing below 6505656 is documented in the sources read here. The finder is similarly under-recorded: no source read here publishes a base length for the S4, the 60mm quoted comes from the cameras that share its casting, and only the life-size magnification is attested on the S4 itself, by two people who have actually used one.