S Nokton 50mm f/1.5 Aspherical

In the Nikon rangefinder system a 50mm lens normally carries no focusing helicoid of its own: it seats on the inner bayonet, and the camera body’s helicoid and focusing wheel do the work. Exactly one lens of the classic era broke that rule — the 1959 rebuild of the 50/1.1 Nikkor, moved out onto the outer bayonet with a focusing mount of its own. Forty-four years later the S Nokton 50mm f/1.5 Aspherical became the second, and it remains the last: the only other fifty ever built for the outer bayonet, and the only aspherical 50 ever produced in the mount. Stephen Gandy, who imported it into the United States, sold it on precisely those two distinctions.

The lens was not designed for Nikon at all. It is Cosina’s 1999 Leica-screw-mount Nokton 50mm f/1.5 Aspherical re-mounted — a double Gauss of six elements in five groups with aspherical surfaces on both faces of the rearmost group, ten blades, a 52mm filter thread, f/1.5 to f/16, 0.9m close focus. The same block later came back in VM mount, which is the trap for anyone shopping: three lenses, one name, one optical design, and only the one carrying an S will focus correctly on a Nikon body. Cosina’s naming encodes the split. Its SC wides — the 21/4, 25/4, 28/3.5 and 35/2.5 — are a single version that serves both Nikon and Contax rangefinders, because at those focal lengths depth of field papers over the two systems’ different helicoid travel. From 50mm up, where the difference actually bites, the lenses are S: Nikon only. Gandy’s launch page wondered whether a Contax version might follow. None ever did.

It arrived in May 2003, into the short window Cosina had opened at Photokina 2002 with the Bessa R2S and R2C — the first new bodies in either classic mount in four decades, and the first ever in them with TTL metering. The window closed fast. The $550 introductory price had fallen to $399 by that October; the R2S and R2C were discontinued in April 2005, and the whole S/SC lens line was closed out in March 2007. How many were built is the one figure nobody can settle. CameraQuest, the US distributor, published a count for every lens in the line — no Japanese source ever has — and gives 700 for this one; lens-db put it at roughly 600, and that site is now offline. Either way it is a single production run, and a small one.

As a lens it divides along a predictable line: the people shooting it on film like it, and the people testing it on a sensor find 2003. A Japanese owner shooting a Nikon S2 called the rendering solid, nothing breaking down, then put it on an α7R IV and watched the centre stay soft until f/2.8, the corners until f/5.6, colour fringing hold on a stop past wide open, contrast collapse into backlight, and the out-of-focus highlights come back onion-ringed and full of bubbles — clipped to lemon shapes at the frame edge wide open, and uniformly decagonal once stopped down. Not a lens for night illuminations, was his verdict. The counterweight is what draws people to it in the first place: a Korean collector who had let the lens slip his mind entirely, until a friend posted two frames, talked himself into one for its smooth, quiet rendering and dignified blur; and Matt Osborne, who runs it on a Contax-mount R2C, sees very little difference between it and Voigtländer’s 2021 M-mount Nokton 50/1.5. That was always the point of it. Among shelves of fifty-year-old Nikkors and Sonnars, this was the one lens a Nikon rangefinder shooter could pick up in 2003 and simply trust.