The bright and colorful covers that appeared starting in 1954 with the late-production model Nikon S cameras were the work of Yusaku Kamekura of Nippon Design Centre. They established a “look” to Nippon Kogaku’s advertising that persisted up to the changeover to the gold books and boxes of the 1960s.

While as the Nikon SP, S3 and S4 all had only one instruction booklet that remained unchanged throughout the production life of each model, the S2 had two different ones. The reason lies in the illustrations, some of which appear here.

The first instruction booklet would have been assembled in the autumn of 1954 shortly before the public announcement of the Nikon S2 in December 1954. All the illustrations show a chrome-dial camera and a chrome-finished normal lens. This was still the standard in 1954. What is more curious is that the lens page shows only the lenses from 25mm to 135mm, ignoring the longer lenses for the reflex housing. But apparently only the 250mm Nikkor was out of the prototype stage at that point, so these were not really available.

The other major difference is the variable-focal finder, still shown with the parallax adjustment above the shoe.