Introduced in 1959 the S4 is Nikon's rarest production rangefinder body. Borrowing a page from the Leica marketing playbook, the people at Nikon attempted to increase market share by dropping features from the existing S3, thereby reducing production costs and consequently enabling a lower final retail price. The S4 was to be an S3 sans five features:
1. A manually resettable exposure counter more like the black dial S2 than the SP or the soon to be released "F".
2. No self timer.
3. Cloth shutter curtain unlike the titanium foil curtain of the later S3's.
4. Printed (not projected) non parallax compensated frame lines for two (instead of four) lenses (10.5cm and 5cm) only.
5. No motor coupling at the bottom of the film take up spool.
When this camera was proposed to Joe Ehrenreich (the man who was Nikon marketing in the USA EPOI) he saw no purpose to it. He argued, successfully, that it would only further divide S3 sales which were already too weak. As a result none were ever officially imported to the United States and fewer than 5 thousand were produced during its slightly over one year of production life.
All production was chrome. Since nearly all of it was for the Japanese domestic market nearly all have distance engraved in meters. A small number of bodies (fewer than 1/3 of them) were produced for USA military PX's marked in feet and with the "EP" designation. These are the rarest variety of this very rare camera body.