Nikon S3

Nearly every collector source calls the Nikon S3 a simplified SP, and Nikon does not. The two cameras share a chassis, a shutter and a bayonet — apart from the finder their parts interchange completely — and the finder is the whole of the difference: where the SP switches between projected frames covering 28mm to 135mm, the S3 has a single life-size finder with three frames etched permanently into the glass, 35, 50 and 105, all visible at once and uncorrected for parallax. It reached the shops in March 1958, or February according to a different section of Nippon Kogaku’s own 1978 company history, six months behind the SP, at ¥86,000 with the 5cm f/1.4 and a leather case — a price Nikon says it set to match the S2’s rather than to undercut the SP’s ¥98,000, and cut to ¥74,000 a year later when the cheaper S4 arrived. Yet Nikon’s own Camera Chronicle says the S3 “had been developed in advance of the Nikon SP as a successor to the Nikon S2,” and Japanese Wikipedia, citing Nippon Kogaku’s ニコンの世界, says the S3’s design number is the earlier of the two. Gandy, Pacific Rim Camera and Photoethnography all have it the other way about. shiura.com offers a third account, in which the SP, the S3 and the F were developed simultaneously at the urging of Nikon’s American distributor Joseph Ehrenreich, who wanted something to answer the Leica M3. Nothing published settles it.

The life-size finder the camera is loved for is a Leica artifact twice over. shiura.com traces Nikon’s finder research to 1949, before the first Nikon S had even shipped: an 84mm-base prototype at 0.7× was dropped for distorting the body and testing badly, a four-position variable finder covering 35 to 135mm was studied in 1951–52 and killed on weight, and from 1953 the work settled on a 60mm base with something like ten magnification prototypes built around it. The intended production magnification was 0.8×, and tooling was already under way when Leitz announced the M3. Nikon delayed the S2 by roughly six months, went to 1:1, and expected to edge past the M3 on both magnification and effective base length. The S3 inherited that eyepiece and added a 35mm frame to it, which is the basis of Nikon’s claim to “the world’s first life-size 1:1 viewfinder for 35mm focal length lens” — not the first 1:1 finder, but the first to show a 35mm frame at full size. Half the intention appears to have missed, and the arithmetic is worth doing slowly. A rangefinder focuses by triangulation: two windows a fixed distance apart view the subject from slightly different angles, and turning the lens swings a mirror until the two images coincide. Widen that gap — the base length — and the same focusing error throws the images further apart, so it becomes visible sooner and can be nulled more finely. Magnification then multiplies what the eye can resolve of that misalignment, which is why the honest figure is the product of the two: base length × magnification, the effective base length.

Run it across the field and the S3 sits mid-table:

Camera	Base	Magnification	Effective base
Nikon S3	60mm	1.0×	60mm
Nikon SP	60mm	1.0×	60mm
Leica M3	69.25mm	0.92×	63.7mm
Leica M6 (0.85×)	69.25mm	0.85×	58.9mm
Leica M6 (0.72×)	69.25mm	0.72×	49.9mm

So Nikon won the half it advertised and lost the half it did not mention: 1:1 genuinely beats 0.92×, but Leitz’s longer base more than absorbs the difference, and the S3 gains nothing at all over the SP it sits beside. Where the life-size finder does pay is against the M bodies that came after — the 0.72× M6 that most Leica owners actually carry gives up a fifth of the S3’s effective base, which is why an M6 owner focusing a fast fifty reaches for the 0.85× finder and an S3 owner never has to think about it. Nobody performs these multiplications, and Nikon has never published a base length for the S3 at all — the 60mm figure comes from collectors, and neither of the company’s two modern specification sheets for the reissued camera carries a 基線長 row.

Whether the result is a good finder depends on which language you read it in. Gandy is blunt: S3 and S4 finders “usually show a lot of flare, often with a noticeably less contrasty rangefinder than any of the other NRF cameras,” and he prefers every other Nikon rangefinder to them. Karen Nakamura, at Photoethnography, reports the same symptom without the verdict — S3 finders are dimmer than comparable S2 finders — and intends to have the finder re-silvered. Japanese Wikipedia, on Nikon’s own book, says the opposite about the view: that the S3 moved from the gold-vapour-deposited prism used up to the SP to silver deposition, clearing away the dark, green-cast image Nikon had inherited from the Contax. shiura.com supplies the piece that lets both be true. The S3’s semi-transparent mirror covers nearly the whole finder surface bar the centre, but its rangefinder patch is a plain rectangle, smaller than the SP’s and small enough in a dim interior to be swallowed by a dilated pupil, which puts the S3 third behind the S2 and the SP for focusing in the dark. A brighter view with a weaker patch, in other words, plus sixty years of coating decay — though no source says so outright. Reviewers split along the same seam. David de Groot, shooting a reissue, calls it indisputably a masterpiece and a chore, the 35mm frame barely visible and hopeless in spectacles, the 50 and 105 almost on top of one another. Kyle M, on an original, finds the lever advance excellent and the stationary shutter dial a fix for everything that annoyed him about the S2, and shrugs at the 1:1 finder because he shoots with one eye shut anyway.

Black S3s come from two quite separate episodes, and the English-language trade routinely runs them together. During the main run Nippon Kogaku took orders from press organisations for black-enamelled bodies in two narrow serial brackets — 6307453 to 6307508 and 6312108 to 6312278 — which Japanese Wikipedia caps at 250 or fewer, and which collectors distinguish from the later batch by calling them “original black”; one of them, 6312187, made ¥900,000 at a Swedish auction. Then came the camera the market calls the Olympic, whose name did not come from the body. Nikon stopped rangefinder production in 1959 at an aggregate 130,000 cameras, press photographers pressed for more, and in May 1964 the company restarted the SP in limited quantity for the newspapers, fitted with the new double-Gauss 50mm f/1.4 that collectors have called the Olympic Nikkor ever since. Only afterwards, in September 1965 — eleven months after the Tokyo Games had closed — did 2,000 black-paint S3s go on sale, serials 6320001 to 6322561, offered either as a set with that lens at ¥71,400 or as a bare body at ¥42,400. Nital, Pacific Rim Camera and a great deal of dealer copy date the batch to 1964, and Gandy to 1963; Nikon’s own chronicle, Japanese Wikipedia and the Japanese collector accounts all say 1965. By those same local accounts, they did not all sell.

How many were built at all is the one thing the record refuses to agree on. Japanese Wikipedia, on Nippon Kogaku’s ニコンの世界, says 12,310, and 35mmc independently reports about 12,300; Pacific Rim Camera, Photoethnography and Nital all say 14,310, a figure that reads like one number propagated three times and that may well trace to Rotoloni’s book, which none of them names. Both survive contact with the serials: counting 12,310 from 6300001 ends at 6312310, immediately above the highest known original-black number, and 14,310 ends at 6314310, immediately below the highest ceiling anyone publishes. Nital manages to contradict itself inside three sentences, closing the run at a hedged 6313238 and then reporting that 2,000 of its 14,310 cameras were black — the 1965 batch, whose serials begin at 6320001, outside the range it has just given. A second piece of arithmetic fails inside the black brackets, independently of either total: the two are said to hold 50 cameras and 200, but the second spans only 171 numbers.

Nikon then built the camera twice more, forty-two years after the first one reached the shops, and its own account of doing so is unusually candid. The idea came from the factory rather than from marketing. The Camera Chronicle credits Mito Nikon — the plant that had turned out the Nikomat, the F3, the F4, the New FM2 and the FM3A — with asking in spring 1994, while the Leica-led boom in old cameras was still running, whether an S-series body could be built at all. It got hold of the drawings, priced the tooling, found the investment prohibitive, and dropped the question when the market turned in 1995. Three years later Nikon Photo Products came back to Mito with the same proposal from the sales side; parts and processes were reworked until the price came down, Tochigi Nikon was brought in to make the lenses, the two companies signed off in November 1998, and an “S team” was formed the month after. The S3 was chosen over the SP on the least romantic grounds available: the SP’s universal finder had already defeated the engineers once, and they had given it up. About 8,000 Year 2000 models went out from October 2000 at ¥480,000, made under the code M200 from 554 major components and 816 parts all told, with every die cut new because nothing had survived from the first time, with subcontractors handed first-angle drawings to convert into third-angle projections and not knowing there was a difference, and half the supplied top covers ruined because pressing brass 0.5mm thick, against the FM3A’s 0.7mm, defeated the blasting finish. The cloth shutters were fitted by hand, on a bench line running beside the one turning out FM3As, and output began at one camera a day. Two thousand black bodies followed in June 2002, at ¥530,000.

What the record will not do is tell you which of the two editions you are holding. No published source gives a start or an end number for either one’s bodies; the only scheme in circulation — 20xxxx for the chrome, 30xxxx for the black — is Gandy’s at CameraQuest, and nothing else repeats it. The one black body number in hand, S3302251, from a Blue Moon Camera listing, does fall inside it, and shows the other tell: a reissue carries an S3 etched ahead of the serial where an original has a bare number. The lenses are better served. Roland Vink’s database gives an observed span of 201115 to 211355 for the reproduction Nikkor-S 50mm f/1.4, dated 2000 to 2002 — one continuous block of 10,241 numbers covering both editions rather than a separate block for each, against 10,000 cameras. That matters because of a story that has followed the black edition: a Tokyo dealer’s belief, relayed by Gandy with the explicit caveat that he had no confirmation or denial from Nikon, that the 2,000 black cameras were chrome bodies given new covers and backs rather than new cameras. Nikon’s own phrasing — that the black edition was made by redesigning the Year 2000 model — fits either account, and so does a single continuous lens block. Even a distinct serial block for the black cameras would not settle it, since the serial is etched on the top cover and new top covers are precisely what the story proposes. The question is simply open.

The reissues are not much admired, and the reasons are more specific than the reputation. Akagi Kōichi (赤城耕一), who visited the Mito line for アサヒカメラ and is the only witness to it, says flatly that the camera is not well regarded on the used market — while dating it to 1999 in both of his pieces, where Nikon’s order book opens on 6 April 2000. The black edition now trades below its launch price. The complaints from people who actually shoot them are consistent and small: a squeaking focus wheel, reported first-hand and apparently common; a faint rangefinder patch; a long focus throw; a finder that goes nearly blind at the edges behind spectacles; the whole lens rotating as the body focuses it. Jeffery Smith, writing in 2007, found it easier to load than any Leica and quieter than either of his S2s, and thought it looked stamped rather than milled next to his MP. David Smith, seventeen years later, listed every irritation and then said he shoots it anyway, because it is the camera that makes his heart flutter when he squeezes the shutter.