Nikon SP

This is the camera Nikon built to beat Leica, and for a few years around 1958 a lot of working pros thought it had. The SP arrived in 1957 as the top of the Nikon rangefinder line, and the thing that still stops people cold is the viewfinder. It packs frame lines for six focal lengths, 28 through 135, in one window, plus a second smaller window beside it for the wide 28 and 35. No swapping finders, no clipping a shoe-mount brightline to the top plate. For working press shooters in Tokyo this was the whole argument, and a lot of them carried SPs instead of M3s for exactly that reason.

In the hand it feels dense and machined, brass under chrome, with the kind of weight that telegraphs that nothing inside is plastic. The focal-plane shutter runs from a full second to about 1/1000, with flash sync at 1/60, and it has the soft mechanical hush that rangefinders are loved for. You will not announce yourself in a quiet room. Focusing is through a real coupled rangefinder patch, contrasty and easy to nail in daylight, and the Nikon S bayonet mount carried a run of lenses that hold up against anything Leica was making at the time. The 50mm f/1.4 Nikkor is still a lens people chase.

The honest weakness is that it has no meter. None. The SP was a body for photographers who already knew how to read light, and the few late examples that wore a clip-on selenium meter are not what you want to rely on now, because sixty-year-old selenium cells drift low or die outright. That is the gap the Zone Light Meter app fills cleanly. Take an incident reading at the subject, or spot the shadow you care about and place it where you want it on the zone scale, then set the SP by hand. It becomes the meter the body was always designed to live without.

Loading is the period-correct fiddle. The back comes off, the film threads onto a removable takeup spool, and if you have only ever loaded a hinged-back SLR there is a small learning curve. Once you have done it twice it is nothing. The shutter is worth knowing about by year. Early SPs used a rubberized-silk cloth curtain; from 1959 Nikon switched the SP to a titanium-bladed shutter, the same unit fitted to the F. If yours is an early cloth-curtain body, the usual rangefinder caution applies. Do not leave it pointed at the sun with a fast lens wide open, or you can burn a pinhole.

Today the SP sits in grail territory. Clean bodies cost real money, more than a comparable Nikon SLR and into Leica M range, and a proper CLA from someone who knows the rangefinder cam is not cheap either. People buy it for two reasons. Some want the best Japanese rangefinder of its era to actually shoot, and it rewards that, fast and quiet and accurate. Others want the object, the high-water mark of Nippon Kogaku before the F made the rangefinder line obsolete in 1959. Either way you are holding the camera that proved Nikon could build at the very top, and the finder alone still earns the price.