On the Nikon S3
The Nikon S3, then. A rangefinder camera launched in 1958 by a Japanese optics firm that had spent the war making bombsights and periscopes and had now decided, with the quiet confidence of a nation rebuilding, to have a proper go at the Germans. The Leica men sniffed. The Contax men sniffed harder, because the Nikon mount was more or less their mount wearing a false beard. But Nikon pressed on, because Nikon had read the room, and the room was full of Magnum photographers who’d been to Korea and discovered that their Leicas froze and their Nikons did not. This was, the brochure implied, a camera for serious men doing serious things. It was not a camera for you.
What you got for your money was a brass-and-chrome jewel with a 1:1 lifesize viewfinder, which meant you could keep both eyes open and feel briefly like a fighter pilot, and projected frame lines for 35mm, 50mm and 105mm, none of which lit up because that would have been showing off, and the S3 did not show off. It was the cheaper sibling. The grown-up was the SP, which had a separate finder window and an air of expense, and the S3 was what you bought when you wanted the SP’s chassis but had a mortgage. It came, usually, with a 50mm f/1.4 Nikkor that was so good the Leica people pretended not to have noticed.
And then, in 1959, Nikon did something unforgivable. Having built this exquisite rangefinder, having perfected the cloth shutter and the lovely cold heft of it, they took the entire body, bolted a pentaprism and a mirror box on top, called it the Nikon F, and ushered the rangefinder gently towards the door marked “obsolete.” The S3 had been alive for about eighteen months. It was the Betamax of cameras, except Betamax was bad and the S3 was magnificent, which is somehow worse. Nikon themselves clearly felt the guilt, because in the year 2000 they reissued the thing, brand new, for collectors who wanted to own a corpse in mint condition.
The digested S3: a perfect German camera, made in Japan, killed by a better Japanese camera, and now resurrected at vast cost so that men of a certain age can hold it, not load it, and tell you about it at length. You did ask.
