Nikkor-S·C 5cm f/1.5

For a lens that spent less than a year on the market, the Nikkor-S·C 5cm f/1.5 casts an extraordinarily long shadow. Nippon Kogaku’s first super-speed standard lens — a Sonnar type, seven elements in three groups, based on the prewar Carl Zeiss Jena Sonnar 5cm f/1.5 — came from just two serial batches dated May and July 1949 and reached the market in early 1950, which is why both “1949” and “1950” are defensible dates by convention. By December 1950 the new 5cm f/1.4 had superseded it, and only some 800–1,100 had been made across Nikon S bayonet and Leica screw mount. Yet this is the lens David Douglas Duncan carried into the Korean War on his Leica IIIc, and the one whose performance in his hands announced Japanese optics to the world.

The production story fits in two lines of a ledger. The “905” batch, serial-dated May 1949, was the smaller of the two, with more Leica-screw-mount lenses mixed in and fewer pure S-mount survivors; the “907” batch of July 1949 was larger, with a higher proportion of S-mount lenses — and batch “906” was skipped, for reasons unknown. The two mounts were interleaved within those batches rather than split into separate blocks, and the per-mount totals genuinely conflict across sources: CameraQuest estimates roughly 500 Nikon S and 300 LTM, Brian Sweeney’s 2016 research puts it at fewer than 800 total with about 400 in Leica mount and fewer in S, and another detailed source gives about 389 in Nikon S bayonet with more in LTM. Physically it is unmistakable once you know what to look for: chrome only, stopping down no further than f/11, with the aperture set by the second, inner knurled ring — the outer ring, unlike the later f/1.4’s, does not turn — plus twelve aperture blades, no click stops, and the 40.5mm accessory size it shared with the 5cm f/2 rather than the f/1.4’s 43mm.

The Korean War made it famous. Per Brian Sweeney’s research — the deepest published file on this lens — Duncan shot most of his Korea photographs, including the celebrated portrait of Capt. Ike Fenton, USMC, with the 5cm f/1.5 wide open alongside a Nikkor-Q·C 13.5cm f/4, and other photographers — Life’s Hank Walker among them — took note. On December 10, 1950 the New York Times broke the story that a Japanese camera and its lenses “had proven superior to the German cameras” the Life staff had been using — camera expert Mitch Bogdanovitch judged the Nikkors better at full aperture than Zeiss’s own — and an infuriated Carl Zeiss USA president threatened to pull advertising over it. The f/1.5 thus lit the fuse of the German–Japanese optics rivalry that defined the next two decades, even as its faster successor collected the glory.

Why build an f/1.5 and an f/1.4 barely a year apart? Peter Dechert’s Canon research (via Sweeney) traces the f/1.5 design back to 1937, intended for the Hansa Canon but never produced before the war — so when Nippon Kogaku needed a fast fifty on the market, the design was already on the shelf; Sweeney’s surmise is that it bridged the gap while the f/1.4 was still being designed. He also credits it as the first Nikkor with the 18-inch close-focus capability, ahead of the f/1.4 and rigid f/2 of 1950. Today it is among the rarest of all standard Nikkors — rarer, per CameraQuest, than even the 5cm f/1.1 — and market examples tell the story: an early 905-batch lens with ex-Rotoloni provenance changed hands privately around $2,200, a Leitz Auction S-mount example brought €1,800, and Leica-mount lenses have recently listed at $2,800–3,600 and up.