One Small Step
The Nikon S2 wasn't the best rangefinder of its time. But from the S2 to the SP and the S3, Nikon showed it knew when to stop, where to improve, and where its limits were.
Some time ago, I bought a Canon Canonet QL17 GIII, but for various reasons I switched to a Nikon S2. The more I read about it, the more I realized the interesting part isn't the camera itself, but how Nikon moved through its rangefinder era: three cameras, three different choices.
- Nikon S2: knowing when to stop. The Leica M3 arrived as the S2 neared completion. Nikon didn't chase it. They fixed what they still had time to fix and shipped the camera.
- Nikon SP: knowing how to improve. Once the foundation was solid, Nikon poured almost everything it had into one camera.
- Nikon S3: knowing its limits. It trimmed the SP's ambitions so the camera could reach more people.
But first, we need to talk about the camera that made the whole industry take a hard look at itself.
When Leica opened a new era
Going into the 1950s, Germany was still the center of the camera industry. Leica from Ernst Leitz and Contax from Zeiss Ikon had shaped most of the 35mm rangefinder game for decades. The Japanese camera industry was still finding its own identity, and both Nikon and Canon showed clear influences from German designs.
In April 1954, at Photokina in Cologne, Leica unveiled the Leica M3.
Compared with earlier screw-mount Leicas such as the Leica IIIf, the M3 was almost a clean-sheet design. Three changes will come up again and again in this story:
- The viewfinder and rangefinder were combined into one large, bright finder, with built-in framelines for 50mm, 90mm and 135mm lenses.
- All shutter speeds sat on a single dial, instead of being split into separate fast and slow dials.
- The frame counter reset itself when the film door was opened, and film was advanced with a lever instead of a knob.
On top of that, the bayonet M mount replaced the M39 screw mount, laying the foundation for the entire Leica M system that followed.
So, when Leica opened a new generation of rangefinders, where was Nikon?
Nikon and the choice to stop
In its early years, Canon followed a path quite close to Leica's, while Nikon chose to learn more from Contax.
Nikon entered the rangefinder game after the war with the Nikon I, the Nikon M, and the Nikon S. The Contax influence is obvious in the S-mount bayonet, with its two concentric mounts. From that base, Nikon gradually built its own system, with Nikkor lenses and steady changes from one generation to the next.
When the M3 launched in April 1954, the next camera in that line, the Nikon S2, was already in its final stage: its parts had gone into production in 1953.
Nikon had two options: redesign the S2 to catch up with the M3, or fix what could still be fixed and launch. They chose the second. The viewfinder, originally planned at around 0.9x magnification, close to the M3's 0.91x, was reworked to 1.0x to set it apart. Nikon replaced the film advance knob with a lever. In December 1954, eight months after the M3, Nikon released the S2.
The M3 was better, and anyone could see it. But the S2 was nearly done, so Nikon fixed what it could, saved the rest for the next generation, and simply put the camera on the market. Reading this part of the story, I came away with a lot of respect for Nikon.
Nikon S2: One small step
“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” — Neil Armstrong
The S2 was not a giant leap. It was a small step, enough for Nikon to know its foundation would hold. Looking at the camera, you can see clearly where Nikon did well and where it accepted stopping.
Where the S2 stopped
The Nikon S2 is a fully mechanical rangefinder with no built-in light meter. You meter with a separate light meter or estimate exposure with the Sunny 16 rule. The ASA dial on the bottom of the camera only reminds you which film is loaded.
The shutter speed dial in the middle is still a two-tier design: the lower tier for slow speeds, the upper tier for fast speeds. The wheel on the far right is the frame counter, and you have to set it back to 0 yourself after loading film. Or you can ignore it; when the lever won't advance anymore, you know the roll is finished. The Leica M3 had already solved both of these.
The biggest difference is the viewfinder. The S2 has only a single frameline (the yellow frame) for the 5cm focal length, or 50mm as we'd say today. To use any other focal length, you have to mount an external viewfinder to frame your shot, whereas the M3 has framelines for three focal lengths built right into its finder.
And where the S2 did well
The viewfinder has only one frameline, but it has 1.0x magnification, and the rangefinder patch (the yellow spot) sits right in the middle of the frame. Framing and focusing happen in the same window, rather than through two separate windows as on older rangefinders.
The film advance lever uses a single-stroke mechanism, similar to the first Leica M-series cameras. When you advance the film, two arrows on the shutter speed dial point at each other. A glance tells you whether the camera is ready to shoot, so you don't accidentally trip the shutter while it's in your bag and waste a frame. It's a small detail, but you only appreciate how handy it is once you use it.
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I love the S2's focusing system most.
You can still focus by turning the focus ring on the lens (position 2 in the picture), like any other MF (manual focus) lens. But when you turn the lens, the focusing wheel on the body (position 1) turns along with it. S-mount lenses have a fairly long focus throw, so using this small wheel to line up the rangefinder patch is faster and more precise.
When you reach infinity, the focusing mechanism locks. To turn it back, you press the latch on the focusing wheel or the lock button below the rangefinder window, a button shaped rather like a bullet.
The S2's limits, a single-focal-length finder and less streamlined handling, weren't there because Nikon didn't see them. The M3 was right in front of them. But they chose to stop here, keep the foundation, and let the next generation solve the rest.
And that next generation was the SP.
Nikon SP: Knowing how to improve
Released in September 1957, the Nikon SP was Nikon's chance to finish what the S2 had left undone.
First, handling. The two-tier speed dial was replaced with a single dial, with fast and slow speeds on the same ring. The frame counter reset itself when you removed the bottom plate to load film, with marks at 24 and 36 for the common roll lengths of the time. The self-timer, rather fiddly on the S2, was simplified into a separate lever beside the lens.
But the biggest change came in exactly the place where the S2 lost most clearly to the M3: the viewfinder.
One viewfinder for the whole lens system
From the front, the Nikon SP has two viewfinder windows. The main finder on the right has framelines for 5cm, 8.5cm, 10.5cm, and 13.5cm. You select the focal length with a dial on the left side of the body, and the matching frameline appears in the finder, with parallax compensation at close focus. Changing lenses no longer meant mounting an external viewfinder.
Wide angles were the harder problem. The 3.5cm, and especially the 2.8cm, see more than the main finder's field of view. Nikon's answer was a wide-angle finder placed alongside it: it has a frameline for 3.5cm, while 2.8cm uses the finder's entire field of view as its frame. But the rangefinder patch exists only in the main finder, so with these two focal lengths you focus in one window, then move your eye to the other to compose.
It's not the most elegant solution. But it shows the SP's ambition: one camera serving a whole lens system from 2.8cm to 13.5cm without an external viewfinder, something even the M3 couldn't do.
The changes inside
From the Nikon I to the S2, Nikon used one shutter platform, refined step by step with each generation. On the SP, the shutter curtains travel faster, the moving parts are lighter, and a new braking mechanism makes the shutter smoother. As a result, the 1/1000s speed is more consistent, and the flash sync speed rose from about 1/50s to 1/60s.
The first SPs used rubberized habutae silk shutter curtains. Around May 1959, Nikon switched to titanium curtains for SPs built after that.
The SP isn't simply an upgraded S2. The S2 told Nikon its foundation was good enough; the SP is where they built almost everything they had on top of it. That's also why the Nikon SP is often considered the peak of Nikon's rangefinder line.
Nikon S3: Knowing its limits
After the M3, Leica made the M2 (1957) and then the M1 (1959), each simpler than the one before: the M2 dropped the self-resetting frame counter, and the M1 dropped the rangefinder altogether. Whether by accident or on purpose, Nikon followed the same path: the SP, then the S3, then the S4.
Released in March 1958, only six months after the SP, the Nikon S3 used a body and rangefinder system similar to the SP's. But it replaced the dual-finder system with a single 1.0x viewfinder. Three framelines for 3.5cm, 5cm, and 10.5cm are always shown at once: no need to select a focal length, but no automatic parallax compensation either.
On paper, this is a step backward: a narrower focal-length range, no parallax compensation, no wide-angle finder. But the SP's dual-finder system was complex and expensive to build, while most photographers needed only a moderate wide-angle, a standard lens, and a short telephoto. The S3 kept exactly those three focal lengths and dropped the rest.
Knowing your limits doesn't mean doing worse. It means knowing where technical ambition should stop so the camera can still reach many people's hands.
In March 1959, Nikon released the S4 and cut once more: no 3.5cm frameline, no self-timer, no self-resetting frame counter, and no motor drive coupling. According to Nikon, the S4 was made to keep the price low, at a time when other makers were cutting rangefinder prices, and SLRs were starting to compete on value for money.
One small step
Looking back at all three cameras:
- The S2 stopped at the right moment: it didn't chase the M3, fixed only what there was time to fix, and shipped.
- The SP improved as far as it could on the foundation the S2 had proven solid.
- The S3, and then the S4, held themselves back so the SP's achievements could reach the many.
The story doesn't end with rangefinders, either. In 1959, Nikon released the Nikon F, the SLR that opened an entirely different chapter for the company. Nikon itself has noted that the S2 became a "base model", with many of its features still appearing on the company's cameras up until the Nikon F2. Maybe that, too, is knowing your limits: realizing the rangefinder wasn't the road you'd go furthest on, and turning in another direction.
You don't always need a giant leap. Sometimes all it takes is one small step, enough to know your foundation will hold, and from there to choose for yourself when to keep going, when to push hard, and when to step back.
References
- Nikon Corporation, Nikon Rangefinder Cameras
- Wikipedia, Leica M Mount
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- Pacific Rim Camera, Zeiss Ikon Finders for Contax
- Camera-Wiki, Leica (Screw-mount)
- Nikon Corporation, Vol. 8. Nikon S2
- Leica Historica, The Leica M3
- Ken Rockwell, Leica IIIf
- Canon Camera Museum, 1933–1936: The birth of Canon
- Nikon Corporation, Vol. 9. Nikon S/M/I
- John E. Greivenkamp, Camera Systems at University of Arizona, College of Optical Sciences — "Optical Design and Instrumentation I"
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