In the early 1990s, Nikon conceived of a project to remake its venerable Nikon S3 camera.  By October of 2001, they had completed roughly 8,000 replicas.  However, the story of how Nikon achieved this task is quite fascinating and we wanted to share a quick summary...

The dream that would become the S Team at Nikon, began about 1993-94, when employees at Mito Nikon put forth the idea of reaching into Nikon's history and recreating a rangefinder camera.  They initially settled on the S3 because it theoretically used simpler mechanisms that would be easier to replicate and because it was one of the later models in the S series.  Even still, the S3 had been out of production for nearly 40 years, the original dies and machinery had long since been destroyed and few employees had personal experience building these cameras.  Mito Nikon procured the original design drawings from Nikon and set to work.  However, an economic downturn over the next year put the project on hold until 1998.

With the revival of the S3 project, the team decided that authenticity was going to take top precedence over every other factor, including cost and labor.  It is said that every detail of the original was faithfully preserved, from the appearance of the screws in the outer casing, to the coloring of the letters on the shutter dial, to the grain of the leatherette covering, even the very depth and thickness of the etched lines on the top of the camera.  Several times Nikon faced obstacles that could have been circumvented by changing some element of the camera from its original, and each time they persistently stuck to their dedication to making a true to the original S3.  One issue they encountered was that various external components had been manufactured by different companies.  These pieces arrived at Nikon with slight variations in the coloring of their chrome finish, requiring the parts to be rejected and made over again.  Nikon also reported that nearly half of the finished top covers were discarded after flaws that happened in the blasting process.  In short, all of these obstacles added up to increasing production costs for Nikon and the project became more and more expensive, but through it all, Nikon stayed true to their commitment to make a replica as near the original as they could.

Before final production could begin, the team of technicians underwent six months of training.  The entire camera was assembled by hand and this required a great deal of expertise for the workers on the assembly line.  In its initial production run, about one S3 Replica was fully assembled per day, but that eventually sped up as the technicians gained proficiency.  At its conclusion, about 15 cameras were being built a day by a team of 30 workers.  By October of 2001 Nikon had completed its run of approximately 8,000 cameras (a second run would be done in summer of 2002 of about 2,000 more S3 cameras with an all black finish).

It may be easy to pick up the Nikon S3 Replica and overlook all the effort that went into faithfully producing it; here's to hoping you now remember the incredible effort that this Nikon S3 represents.

za/sd