S APO-Lanthar 85mm f/3.5

In 2003 Cosina did something Nippon Kogaku never had: it built an apochromatic telephoto for the Nikon rangefinder. The S APO-Lanthar 85mm f/3.5 is, in Stephen Gandy’s words, “the only APO tele lens ever produced in Nikon Rangefinder mount” — six elements in five groups around anomalous-dispersion glass, ten aperture blades, a 39mm filter thread, rangefinder coupling down to one metre, 262 grams in a two-tone silver-and-black barrel. Six hundred were made. That figure comes from Gandy, who imported the line into the United States, and from nowhere else: Cosina has never published a count, and no Japanese source has either. In his round-up of what is worth shooting on a Nikon rangefinder, Gandy rated it probably the sharpest short tele ever made in the mount.

The S in its name is a boundary marker. Cosina’s wide-angle Skopars for these bodies were badged SC, and a single version of each fitted both the Nikon S and the classic Zeiss Contax bayonet — and the Kiev copies of it. The two mounts look alike from outside and share their back focus, but Nikon modified the Contax design around a slightly different standard focal length, and the two helicals travel by different amounts. From 21mm to 35mm depth of field papers over the difference; from 50mm up it shows, and Gandy pins down where: roughly f/4 and wider, closer than about twenty feet. Beyond that, at infinity, any of them will do. So the four longer Cosina lenses — the three 50s and this 85 — were cut for the Nikon mount alone and marked S.

The mount’s architecture leaves a mark on handling too. A Nikon rangefinder carries the focusing helical for 50mm lenses inside the body, with the 50mm bayonet inside that helical and a second bayonet outside it for everything wider or longer. The index-finger wheel that makes an SP or a Bessa R2S a one-handed camera drives only the internal helical, and Gandy’s warning is blunt: do not use it on 85mm and longer lenses, because the mechanism is not strong enough and you will likely damage the camera. This lens sits on the outer bayonet and focuses on a helical of its own — a rotating one, so the front section, aperture ring and aperture scale included, turns as it goes. Owners learn to pin the focus ring with thumb and middle finger and work the aperture with the index finger, because the aperture ring moves easily enough to drag focus with it.

It arrived with the cameras it was meant for. At Photokina 2002 Cosina announced the Bessa R2S and R2C — the first and only production cameras with TTL metering ever made in the classic Nikon and Contax rangefinder mounts — and with them three new lenses for the Nikon mount: the 28/3.5, the 50/2.5 and this 85. Gandy credits the whole improbable venture to Cosina’s CEO Hirofumi Kobayashi (小林博文), a serious collector willing to tool up for a market no large manufacturer would touch. Cosina’s own records date the Japanese release to March 2003 at ¥65,000 before tax; the US introduction came in May, with lenses in dealers’ hands by June, at $425, later settling at $379. The lens and both cameras were discontinued in April 2005, when Cosina turned its attention to Leica-mount rangefinders.

Whether it is really an 85 is a question Japanese collectors have argued for years. The Leica-screw APO-Lanthar 90mm f/3.5 of 2001 shares its six-in-five layout, its ten blades, its 39mm filter, its one-metre close focus and very nearly its weight — 260 grams against 262 — and the common telling, repeated on Japanese blogs, is that the S lens is simply that lens relabelled, 85 being the frameline a Nikon rangefinder gives you at that end of the finder; the R2S projects 35, 50 and 85 and nothing longer. Cosina’s spec sheets do not settle it, since both lenses are listed at the same 27-degree angle of view. But the blogger Shige, scaling the construction diagrams from Cosina’s own catalogue PDF to a common size, found the layout identical and the element thicknesses different: siblings recomputed for a viewfinder, not twins with a new nameplate. He sold his 90 before he could shoot the two side by side, and no published comparison has surfaced since.