Nikon Rangefinder Camera Bodies: The "SP" Body

The Nikon SP Rangefinder Body



Introduced September of 1957 with onset SN6200001 the SP was arguably the most advanced rangefinder of that time and for several decades to come. The SP was produced for a total of almost eight years and a successor had been planned for introduction in 1966 but its future fell victim to the massive success of another Nippon Kogaku product, the Nikon F. The comparative sales figures tell all. While the total sales of SP's barely reached over 22,000 in almost eight years of active marketing and production, its brother, the Nikon F, exceeded five times that in each of several of its good years. Also, when Nikon started to offer some highly advanced design and extremely sharp wide angle lenses for the F, a heretofore Achilles heel of SLR lens design, the need for a rangefinder in an professional's arsenal became moot.

the relative simplicity of the SP's design execution hid some very elegant refinements: The shutter speed wheel now aligned all the speeds in a convenient circular linear array. The wheel would also couple to a mated in design meter that allowed the photographer to directly read out suggested F stops from a shoe mounted meter. (The next obvious step was to cross couple the aperture ring of the lens, which the Nikon F did do in the three mounted meter predecessors of the Photomic heads.)

Concentric to the shutter speed rotation and accessed by pulling up on the dial and rotating it were four color coded "X" and flashbulb settings that allowed X sync at 1/60 and flashbulb coordinated exposures to 1/1000 incorporating the proper delays for bulb burn up.





With the space for the shutter time delay for flashbulbs cleared by the placement of this function elsewhere, this wheel is now made available for the dial-in bright line viewfinder which brings us to perhaps the most distinguishing and noteworthy features of the SP which are its viewfinder schemes. The main system is a combined viewfinder/rangefinder bright line parallax compensated dial switchable 5.0cm/8.5cm/10.5cm/13.5cm scheme. Just to its left is a finder which is dark line marked for 3.5cm and which full view is 2.8cm. This obviates the need for accessory viewfinders unless 2.5cm or shorter focal length lenses are employed. Also the imperative for an integrated rangefinder is greatly lessened at the shorter focal lengths due to their much greater depth of field at all but especially at smaller apertures.

The first nearly 2/3 of SP production, 14,000 or so (as with the first 100 or so Nikon F's and rumor/folklore has it the the switch to titanium curtains for the two was substantially concurrent) had cloth shutters while the remaining approximately 8,000 employed titanium curtains.

In a manner similar to the F, the change of an internal baseplate, any SP (or S3 or S4 for that matter) any SP is capable of taking a motor. Needles to say, these baseplates are very, very hard to find.