Nikkor-Q(·C) 5cm f/3.5

In December 1945, four months after the surrender, Nippon Kogaku restarted civilian lens production with this lens: the collapsible Nikkor-Q·C 5cm f/3.5, the company’s first postwar photographic lens by its own official chronicle, opening the 705xxxx serial block. It could hardly be a more modest vessel for that distinction — a four-element, three-group Tessar derivative (the Q stands for quatuor, four) copied so closely from the Leitz Elmar 50mm f/3.5 that even the iris sits in the Elmar’s position behind the front element, itself a clone of the Zeiss Tessar. A clone of a clone, built in a country whose industry lay in ruins — and the seed of everything Nikkor became.

The design was already a decade old by then. It dates to the mid-1930s, when Canon — then incapable of making its own optics — turned to Nippon Kogaku to supply lenses for the Kwanon prototypes and the Hansa Canon, Japan’s first 35mm cameras. The serial record traces that whole life: prewar Hansa Canon blocks with “Nippon-Kogaku Nr.” engravings (a later sub-block with a modified aperture), Canon-fit runs around 1940, and wartime blocks already marked Q·C Tokyo — coated. The postwar collapsible carried the Q·C Tokyo markings and ten aperture blades into the 705xxxx block, about 2,782 lenses from December 1945 onward.

Its place in an S-mount catalog is, honestly, marginal. The 705xxxx block interleaves Leica-screw and Nikon S examples in a single sequence, but only a handful have ever surfaced in Nikon mount, and no S-mount catalog listing is documented anywhere — this was a Leica-screw and Canon-fit lens first, an S-mount lens almost incidentally. It earns its page not as a system staple but as the origin point: the lens Nippon Kogaku chose, or defaulted to, when it started over.

The design got one last act as a rigid Leica-screw lens in 1955–56 — about 5,581 made, serials 213301–218881, with the iris moved behind the second element, closer to a true Tessar — before roughly two decades of production ended. Shooters today report exactly what a 1930s Tessar formula behind early coating should deliver: decent central sharpness, weak corners, a pronounced spherical-aberration glow in the highlights, and severe flare when the sun enters the frame — with contrast ranging from the collapsible’s muted classic look to the rigid version’s stunning micro-contrast, a rendering one Japanese reviewer credits with carrying Nikkor’s origin point into the present.