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Konica lenses pre 1990 – Leica fit
Filed in - Konica (RF) - November 22, 2007
When I started to look for information on older Konica lenses with a Leica fitting (see here for newer Konica lenses), I assumed that there would be quite a few. Konica was a master lens maker, and had sold a range of camera systems. But, no, I could only find three:
Konishiroku Hexar 50mm F3.5
Hexanon 50mm f1.9
Hexanon 60mm f1.2 1956
and nothing I’ve seen suggests a bigger haul that I’ve missed. This might be because their own Leica fit camera body never made it to market, or it might be for any number of other reasons.
Of the three, the first in the list (f3.5 50mm) is rare. It is mentioned in the Japanese language Wikipedia and I’ve seen (translation mistakes aside) one listed for sale in a Japanese store. The faster 50mm lens is freely available secondhand (which isn’t to suggest that it is cheap, but if you want one you could buy one today). The super fast 60mm lens is not only an odd length, but seems to be super rare. I’ve only found passing references to it – usually in relation to the much newer lens of the same outward specification. However, the advert at the head of this post does suggest it was available for sale in the US and did, indeed, exist.
If you click on the thumbnail you’ll get the whole advert which contains a number of other Konica items from the same year.
One of the interesting things about that ad for the 60mm is the claim that it doesn’t suffer from shift of focus on stopping down. As focus shift is an issue with the 50mm Sonnar f1.5 and other similar designs, and is fairly inherent on fast lenses then one wonders how much ad-speak and how much truth was involved in the claim.
In practice, there probably isn’t much of interest here in Konica’s backlist for practical shooters. I’m sure that all three lenses are good lenses for their age, it is more that you are unlikely to come across one casually.