Micro-Nikkor 5cm f/3.5

No lens in the Nikon rangefinder system had a stranger commission than the first Micro-Nikkor. Initiated by Professor Zyun Koana (小穴) of the University of Tokyo, it was built not for photographers but for the Japanese written language: dense Kanji text demanded more resolving power than the Western microfilm systems of the day could deliver. Nippon Kogaku’s answer was a 5cm lens guaranteed to resolve 100 lines per millimeter at the center wide open, and around 200 in tests: it out-resolved the film of its day. Mass production began on 4 May 1956 — prototype drawings date back to April 1952, and Nikon’s Japanese text says it was productized in October 1956 — and only 1,188 were ever made.

The design came from inside Koana’s orbit: Zenji Wakimoto (脇本) proposed the structure and Azuma (東) finished it — a Xenotar type, five elements in four groups, deliberately computed in older, non-lanthanum glass. The prototypes, serials 523001–523002, were engraved “R-NIKKOR·C” — renamed Micro-Nikkor to avoid confusion with Roentgen (X-ray) optics. Koana himself supplied the proof of concept with a 1955 stunt: the entire 70-page novella Takekurabe (たけくらべ) photographed onto a single 125×75mm microcard at a reduction of 1/13.5.

Production tells a collector’s story. The Rotoloni figures put the run at 1,188 total — 901 in Nikon S mount, 287 in Leica screw mount, a split now carried everywhere from Grays of Westminster to Wikipedia — against Pacific Rim Camera’s looser “~1,500 both mounts”; Roland Vink’s observed serial span of 1,406 sits between. The two mounts share one interleaved serial block rather than separate ranges: “Micro·C” engraving through 523704, plain “Micro” from 523900, with a documented LTM example (523191) sitting inside the ·C batch. The S-mount version has no focusing unit at all — it rides the camera body’s helicoid — while the rarer LTM version carries its own, focusing to 3 feet normally and down to 1.5 feet with the helicoid extended, decoupled from the rangefinder at close range; on both, the collapsible barrel exists for high-magnification bellows work, the optics optimized for 1:12 reproduction. At $199.50 it cost $30 more than the 5cm f/1.4, in a 145g package.

The design’s afterlife outlasted the whole rangefinder system: stretched to 55mm for the F mount, the same basic five-element structure defined Micro-Nikkors for decades. Richard Haw, whose repair series on the 50/55mm Micro-Nikkors took him a decade to complete, calls it the best-performing 50mm Nikkor of the rangefinder era — sharp wide open into the corners, essentially distortion-free, let down only by its 1950s-era coating in backlight — and the best-constructed small 5cm rangefinder Nikkor he has handled: “even the tiny screws are exquisite.” His practical verdict is the one buyers still face: the S-mount lens is for collectors, and the LTM lens, with its own helicoid, is the one to shoot.