The two Instruction Booklets for the Nikon S2

The first Nikon S2 Instruction booklet on the left dating to 1954. The second version on the right dating to mid-1956.

With the establishment of a new distributor for its products in the United States, Ehrenreich’s “Nikon, Inc.,” Nippon Kogaku revised the instruction books that came with its cameras.

The bright and colorful covers that appeared starting in 1954 with the late-production model Nikon S cameras were the work of Yusaku Kamekura of Nippon Design Centre. They established a “look” to Nippon Kogaku’s advertising that persisted up to the changeover to the gold books and boxes of the 1960s.

While as the Nikon SP, S3 and S4 all had only one instruction booklet that remained unchanged throughout the production life of each model, the S2 had two different ones. The reason lies in the illustrations, some of which appear here.

The first instruction booklet would have been assembled in the autumn of 1954 shortly before the public announcement of the Nikon S2 in December 1954. All the illustrations show a chrome-dial camera and a chrome-finished normal lens. This was still the standard in 1954. What is more curious is that the lens page shows only the lenses from 25mm to 135mm, ignoring the longer lenses for the reflex housing. But apparently only the 250mm Nikkor was out of the prototype stage at that point, so these were not really available.

The other major difference is the variable-focal finder, still shown with the parallax adjustment above the shoe.
The second version must date from the spring of 1956, for the new Micro-Nikkor does not appear in the display on the next-to-last-page, but the 50mm f1.1 Nikkor does. The second version of the reflex housing is there, as are its lenses and even the Leica-thread mount versions of the rangefinder optics. Note also that the variable-focal finder illustrated is the final version with the parallax adjustment moved to a ring around the finder eyepiece. But the biggest change is that the normal lens on all the camera shots is a black-finished 50mm Nikkor and all but one of the other Nikkors are in their final black-mount versions. That is the major reason NK decided to go with a new version of their S2 instructions.

The lens page from the first S2 instructions. Note that none of the reflex housing, short-mount lenses are shown. Lenses are still chrome-finished.

The lens page from mid-1956. Note the added lenses, now in their black-mount versions.

Anyone know if the pictures got changed again when the S2 morphed into the black-dial version of the camera in the fall of 1957?