Nikkormat FS
Nippon Kogaku · Nikon F mount · 24×36mm on 35mm film · 1965
via machine translation — corrections welcomeAlso known as: Nikomat FS · Nippon Kogaku Nikkormat FS · ニコマートFS
Variants & identification
| Variant | Mount | Years | Serial ranges | Production |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nikkormat FS | Nikon F | 1965 | — | Contested three ways between about 25,000, near 15,000 and 12,900; the lower pair is better supported. No factory figure has been published |
- Nikon's own Camera Chronicle gives the FS one sentence, as a caption: released at the same time as the FT, without exposure metering or mirror-up. The article around it runs to several pages on the FT's design, its market and the meeting that changed it. That proportion is the most accurate published statement of what the FS was worth to the company.
- No production figure has been published by Nikon for the FS, and none for the FT either. Every quantity in circulation is an outside estimate.
- The FS is the FT with two things removed and nothing added: the meter with its indexing ring and film-speed scale, and the mirror lock-up. The shutter, the body casting, the finder, the advance and the flash terminals are the FT's.
- English Wikipedia records the FT as offered in black-with-chrome and in all black, and separately notes that all-black Nikkormat bodies are uncommon. It does not say whether the FS was catalogued in both finishes, and no source examined does.
- The deleted mirror lock-up leaves a contradiction on the body. Toyoda Kenji, a Nikon engineer of thirty years who later taught at Nihon University, points out that the FS still carries the rotation-stop key at the 11 o'clock position that the 21mm f/4 needs — almost certainly because the die-cast shell is the FT's — on a camera that cannot use the 21mm at all, since that lens requires the mirror to be locked up. He calls the result ちぐはぐ, ill-matched, and says the deletion saved only a few parts on a camera aimed partly at professionals, where Canon kept the feature on the comparable FP.
- Toyoda also records one change rather than a deletion: the knob on the shutter speed dial was given knurling on the FS where the FT's is plain.
- A teardown by the repairer nikora060 finds the FS front plate still pierced with the die-cast holes for the coupled external meter that Nippon Kogaku abandoned before the FT shipped — physical corroboration of Nikon's own account that the Nikkormat was laid out around an external cell. The same teardown notes brass in the counter screws and the shutter charge rack, replaced by iron or stainless steel on later models, a coarse Fresnel screen at 12.5 lines per millimetre with an 8-degree microprism, and fungus on the finder's anti-reflection coating as characteristic of Nikons of this age.
- Casual Photophile's retrospective gives the FT's price with the 50mm f/1.4 as ¥54,500 against the FS's ¥37,800 with the 50mm f/2 — a different pairing from the ¥45,000 FT-with-f/2 figure recorded above, not a conflicting one.
How to tell them apart
- Shutter speeds on a ring around the lens mount rather than a top-plate dial — the Nikkormat signature
- A flat-topped prism cover, deliberately unlike the Nikon F's peak
- A top plate with nothing on it but the wind lever, the release, the counter and the rewind knob: no meter needle, no film-speed scale, no battery cover
- Serial number engraved with an FS prefix, where the FT and FTn carry FT
Nikkormat FS:
- No cell window on the front of the prism housing and no meter needle on the top plate
- No film-speed scale and no aperture coupling lug on the ring around the mount — with no meter there is nothing to index
- No mirror lock-up: the only Nikkormat without one
- Earliest bodies have the frame-counter window flush with the top plate, where the advance lever scratches it; later bodies add a raised ring around it
- Nikkormat FS: One model, and no finder or meter versions to list: the Nikkormat prism and screen are both fixed, which is most of what separates the line from the Nikon F. Nikon never replaced the FS. When the FT became the FTn in October 1967 the unmetered body simply stopped, and no later Nikkormat was sold without a meter.
Serial-range notes
- FS prefix
- No manufacturer serial list has been published for any Nikkormat. Collector reports place FS numbers in a block of their own beginning 7400001, with none observed above roughly 7415xxx — which would put the run near 15,000 rather than the 25,000 usually quoted. Neither the starting number nor the ceiling could be traced to any published serial survey, and the block sits oddly beside the FT-prefixed numbering the FT and FTn share below FT 3500001. The two claims cannot both be checked from anything in print.
Specifications
- Format
- 24×36mm on 35mm film
- Finder
- Fixed eye-level pentaprism with a fixed screen, non-interchangeable · no rangefinder image
- Shutter
- Vertical-travel metal focal plane, on the Copal Square pattern · 1s – 1/1000 and B, mechanical throughout; the camera takes no battery at all · flash sync X at 1/125 or slower, on separate X and M terminals; the shoe is an accessory shoe with no contact · self-timer
- Film advance
- Single-stroke lever
- Back
- hinged
- Meter
- None. Exposure is set by hand, or from a meter carried separately — the FS is the only Nikkormat without a meter of its own, and one of the last new Nikon reflexes sold without one
- Motor drive
- Not compatible — None, and no winder either. No mechanical Nikkormat accepts one; the coupling arrives in 1976 on the electronic ELW.
- Weight
- 715 g
- Dimensions
- 148 × 95 × 54 mm
- Country
- Japan
- Original price
- $113 for the body in the United States in 1965 (today $1,130), against $183 for the metered FT — a 62% premium for a cadmium-sulphide cell and a needle. In Japan the FS was ¥37,800 with the Nikkor-H Auto 50mm f/2, where the FT was ¥45,000 with the same lens and ¥54,500 with the 50mm f/1.4
- Accessories
- AR-1 cable release · Separate hand-held meter — the camera has no provision for one of its own
Nothing is displayed in it. The FT puts a meter needle in the finder and the FTn adds the shutter speed; the FS shows the focusing screen and no information of any kind.
Where sources disagree
- Last
- 1967 — base2photo, mynikons.org (which gives August 1967) and the Japanese chronology at kintarou.skr.jp, with old stock keeping the camera on dealers' shelves for some years afterwards
- 1971 — English Wikipedia
Better supported: 1967, for manufacture
The gap can be read as manufacture against availability, but neither account says which of the two it is reporting. On weight of evidence 1967 is the better-supported end of manufacture: three independent accounts give it, one of them to the month, against Wikipedia's single undated 1971, and it coincides with the FT becoming the FTn in October 1967 — the moment the unmetered body lost the shell it shared. A camera still on sale in 1971 out of old stock is consistent with all four accounts. years.last is nonetheless left unset, because no source says which of the two spans it is measuring and the field would assert a precision none of them claims.
- Production
- Roughly 25,000 — base2photo, stated as a belief rather than a record
- Near 15,000, inferred from collector observation that no FS serial has been seen above about 7415xxx in a block beginning 7400001
- 12,900 — the repairer nikora060, who pairs it with 129,800 for the FT, making the FS a tenth of the metered camera. The figure circulates in Japanese writing on the model without a stated origin.
Better supported: The two lower figures. Something in the range of 13,000 to 15,000 is better supported than the 25,000 usually repeated, though none of the three is a count
The second is arithmetic on an unpublished observation, not a count, and the third is a Japanese figure quoted without provenance. Weighed rather than left level, they do not stand equal. The 25,000 is offered by its own source as a belief and rests on nothing; the 15,000 is at least tied to cameras, being a ceiling read off the highest FS serial anyone reports; and 12,900 sits comfortably under that ceiling, so the two lower values are consistent with each other in a way neither is with 25,000. Read together they say the run was somewhere in the low teens of thousands. Two cautions hold that short of a finding. The serial ceiling depends on a block starting at 7400001 that no published survey confirms, and if the block is wrong the ceiling goes with it; and 12,900 has no more stated provenance than 25,000 does. Nothing from Nikon exists against which to test any of them, and the numeric fields are left as they were.
- Weight (grams)
- 715g, body only — the Japanese chronology at kintarou.skr.jp, which also gives the launch price
- 705g and 724g — two figures that appear in dealers' specification sheets, disagreeing with each other as well as with the above
No weight for the FS was found in anything published by Nikon. The metered FT is given as 745g by Wikipedia and 756g elsewhere, so a lighter FS is at least the right direction.
What reviewers say
- 豊田堅二 Kenji Toyoda (PRONEWS, ニコンの系譜 Vol.09) (blog) — A Nikon engineer of thirty years, writing on his old employer's cameras, finds the FS ちぐはぐ — ill-matched. He cannot account for the missing mirror lock-up, which saved only a handful of parts on a camera partly aimed at professionals when Canon kept it on the equivalent FP, and points out that the body still carries the 11 o'clock rotation-stop key for the 21mm f/4, a lens the camera cannot use without the mirror locked up. He notes the knurled knob on the shutter dial as the one thing changed rather than removed. via machine translation — corrections welcome
- nikora060 (にこらのブログ, camera repair) (blog) — A teardown rather than a shooting report, and it produces the most concrete things anyone has published about the camera: 12,900 built against 129,800 FTs, die-cast holes still in the front plate for the coupled external meter that was abandoned before the FT shipped, a coarse 12.5 lines-per-millimetre Fresnel screen with an 8-degree microprism, and brass in the counter screws and shutter charge rack that later models replaced with iron or stainless steel. He reads the whole thing as visible trial and error, and reports heavy fungus on the finder's anti-reflection coating as typical of Nikons of this age. via machine translation — corrections welcome
- Studio Taito (Tokyo) (blog) — A collector's account rather than a shooting one. He likes the clean top plate with nothing metering-related left on it and argues it is the honest choice over an FT whose meter has died; against that, he records that the camera did not sell, is seldom seen secondhand, and is still cheap, because the people who collect Nippon Kogaku want an F or an F2 instead. via machine translation — corrections welcome
- Josh Solomon (Casual Photophile) (blog) — The long retrospective on the Nikkormat line gives the FS a single clause — the unmetered, non-mirror-lock-up version of the FT, ¥37,800 with the 50mm f/2 against ¥54,500 for an FT with the f/1.4 — and no assessment of the camera in its own right, which is roughly the weight the FS carries in the English-language literature generally.
History
The Nikkormat FS is the camera the Nikkormat was supposed to be. Nikon’s own account of the design is unusually candid: through the early 1960s Nippon Kogaku had been working on a cheaper F-mount body with a coupled meter cell on the outside, and in early 1965 a management meeting had to decide whether to throw that away, because Topcon had shipped through-the-lens metering in 1963 and Pentax in 1964. The decision went to TTL, the die-cast moulds were recut, and in July 1965 two cameras went on sale. The FT has the new meter. The FS is the old plan.
What that means on the body is a top plate with almost nothing on it. No cell window on the prism front, no needle repeated beside the accessory shoe, no film-speed scale on the ring around the mount and no aperture coupling lug there either, because with no meter there is nothing to index a maximum aperture to. There is no battery compartment: the shutter is mechanical from 1 second to 1/1000 and the camera will work forever without a cell in it. The mirror lock-up also went, which makes the FS the only Nikkormat without one — the single deletion that has nothing to do with metering. Nobody has explained it, and the man best placed to try cannot: Toyoda Kenji, thirty years a Nikon engineer, calls the omission puzzling on a camera aimed partly at professionals, notes that it saved only a few parts where Canon kept the feature on the equivalent FP, and observes that the FT’s die-casting left behind the rotation-stop key at 11 o’clock for the 21mm f/4 — a lens the FS cannot take, because it needs the mirror locked up. The key is there and the lens will not go on it.
The market answered immediately. The FS was $113 in the United States and the FT $183, a 62% premium for a cadmium-sulphide cell and a needle, and buyers paid it. In Japan the same gap was ¥37,800 against ¥45,000 with the same 50mm f/2. When the FT was replaced by the FTn in October 1967 the FS was not replaced at all, and no Nikkormat after it was ever sold without a meter. Nikon’s Camera Chronicle, which spends pages on the FT’s design and the meeting that changed it, gives the FS a single caption: released at the same time as the FT, without exposure metering or mirror-up systems. That proportion is itself the finding.
Everything numerical about the camera is contested. Manufacture ended in 1967 by three accounts and in 1971 by a fourth, and none of them says whether it is describing production or availability — old stock is documented to have sat on shelves for years. About 25,000 were built on the figure usually quoted in English, which is offered as a belief; collectors report FS serials in a block of their own beginning 7400001 with nothing seen above roughly 7415xxx, which would make it nearer 15,000; and Japanese writing on the camera gives 12,900 against 129,800 FTs, a tenth of the metered model, likewise with no stated origin. The two lower numbers agree with each other and not with the one everybody repeats — and they agree in the right direction, since 12,900 fits under the serial ceiling and 25,000 does not, so the low teens of thousands is the better-supported reading even though no one has counted. Published weights run 705, 715 and 724 grams. Nikon has published none of these numbers, and no manufacturer serial list exists for any Nikkormat.
The serial block is the loose thread worth pulling. If FS numbers really begin at 7400001 under their own prefix, then the FS was numbered entirely separately from the FT and FTn, whose shared FT-prefixed sequence runs up to FT 3500001 and onward — and a count of surviving FS numbers would settle the production question in an afternoon. Nobody appears to have done it, and until someone does, the rarest mechanical Nikkormat is a camera whose quantity is known only as a range twice as wide as its lower bound.
This history is AI-written, from the sources listed at the foot of the page. Where the record is silent it says so rather than filling the gap — but no human wrote these sentences.
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