this picture isn’t even vaguely related to this post
If you’ve ever wanted to know about the millenial reissue of Nikon’s classic SP and S3 rangefinders, check out these two translations: SP and S3. For the first couple of years of digital’s dominance, you could actually get one of these reissues for fairly cheap. Nobody wanted film cameras, and certainly not old style film cameras. I can remember watching B&H repeatedly slash prices on them, as they did with the Limited Edition Hexar RF sets, and wondering if the bargains would hold out long enough for me to save my pennies. They didn’t. Now these things have ‘collector’ price tags.
The motivations – pride, customer appreciation – and skills – the original cameras were assembled by ‘engineers’ who made their own tools – behind these reissues are kind of quaint and utterly fanatical in a way that few things still are. I wonder if Nikon could pull off something like this again. I’m not real keen on the idea of reissues for the sake of reissues, but some of these older designs have simple, ergonomic merits that today’s wunder-plastik-multi-control-machines lack.
