The future had a strange appeal in the 1950s.  Perhaps it was due to the ever-present threat of global nuclear war brought on by the Cold War.  Or perhaps it was born out of a reaction to the violence of the Second World War, which had ended just a handful of years prior.  Whatever the case, a lot of the world was looking forward, in various ways, to the abstract hopes held in the as-yet unexplored future.  While we don't know what the mindset was behind the folks at Futura Kamerawerk when they introduced their line of Futura rangefinder cameras, they were swimming in this same future-focused waters.

Introduced in 1952 as an update on the original Futura camera, the Futura-S had a relatively short production run of only five years.  Production of this camera ended in 1957, the same year the Futura Kamerawork company would go out of business. Online research suggests only about 9,000 Futura-S cameras were ever made, making this a fairly rare camera to come across. 

Despite its nod toward technological innovation implicit in the camera's name, the Futura-S is a pretty average, albeit well-built, rangefinder camera.  The Futura-S has, more or less, exactly what you would expect of an upper end but second tier rangefinder camera from the 1950s.  It features a reliable Synchro-Compur leaf shutter situated behind an interchangeable lens. Similar to the Contax rangefinders of the time, the lens mounted (via a 33.8mm thread) into a focusing helicoil.  This meant that the lenses themselves were pretty simple mechanically, basically a stack of optics with an aperture diaphragm.  Futura Kamerawerk's history had been wrapped up in manufacturing optics before they began building cameras, and the simple setup with the Futura-S allowed them to make some interesting and fast lenses for the system.  The standard lens commonly found on these bodies is a Futura-Evar 50mm f/2, but there was also a faster f/1.5 variant, along with a handful of wider and more telephoto focal lengths. The Synchro-Compur shutter is capable of speeds between 1/500 to 1 second, plus bulb - exactly as one might expect.  The camera sports a coupled rangefinder and, other than, a mechanical self-timer that is about it.

If anything really stands out about the Futura-S it is, unfortunately, the unrefined feel that comes with handling the camera and navigating its controls.  While everything on the Futura-S looks and feels well-made, the placement of some of its functions makes the camera feel like it is still a bit of a prototype, possibly awaiting refinement in future versions that would never be.  An example of this is the crowded grouping of the flash sync selector, shutter speed control, aperture selection, and focus ring.  These controls are all jammed onto the barrel area of the lens mount and often overlap one another. Users without a lot of manual dexterity are bound to find this arrangement tedious, if not frustrating. The top of the camera also has a slightly irregular layout of controls, with an accessory shoe offset to make room for a self-timer lever. The frame counter is a primitive "count down" type that needs to be manually reset with each roll. Also, the advance knob can be easily unscrewed if turned the wrong direction.  This is all nitpicky and honestly is what helps make the Futura-S more interesting.  It is like we are seeing a snapshot in the evolution of a camera design that was frozen in time and it leaves us wondering what the future of the Futura-S would have been had the company survived longer.

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