SC-Skopar 28mm f/3.5

In September 2003 a brand-new 28mm wide angle went on sale for two camera mounts that had been out of production for forty years. The Voigtländer SC-Skopar 28mm f/3.5 was the fourth wide Cosina built for the classic rangefinders, announced at Photokina 2002 and delivered a year later at $385, and like the 21, 25 and 35 that preceded it, it was one lens that fitted both systems — the Nikon rangefinders and the Zeiss Contaxes of the 1930s through the 1950s, plus the Soviet Kiev copies of the Contax. Seven hundred were built, in a single production run; there was never a second.

The name carries the explanation. S-C stands for the Nikon S series and the classic Zeiss Contax rangefinders, and the lens has no focusing helicoid of its own: it clamps onto the external bayonet and is focused by the wheel and internal helical in the camera body. Nikon had copied the Contax bayonet and its back focus but not the exact rotation from close focus to infinity, which is why swapping telephotos between the two systems goes wrong — at 28mm the depth of field simply swallows the difference. That is the dividing line running through the entire Voigtländer line for these mounts: the wides are marked SC and work on both, while everything from 50mm up is marked S and stays Nikon-only.

Optically it is the Leica-screw Color-Skopar 28mm f/3.5 in a different mount — seven elements in five groups, multi-coated, stopping to f/22, on a 43mm filter thread whose screw-in hood has to come off before a filter goes on. It weighs 138 grams and focuses to 0.9m, the same close limit as the rest of the SC wides. The barrel turns as you focus, so there are two sets of aperture numbers to keep one readable, and the aperture ring sits outside near the hood, the reverse of the vintage Nikkor wides that set the aperture on a ring inside the filter ring. That 43mm thread is the classic Nikkor rangefinder size, so filters and front caps carry straight over from the old 21/4, 28/3.5, 35/3.5, 35/2.5, 35/1.8, 50/1.4 and 135/3.5. In the box was a slip-on focusing wheel that grips the barrel, for anyone who would rather focus at the lens than at the camera — but no viewfinder, unlike the SC 21 and 25. The matching accessory was Voigtländer’s black metal 28mm brightline, which Stephen Gandy, the line’s US distributor, rated the best 28mm brightline ever made.

Every production figure for these lenses traces back to one place. CameraQuest, Gandy’s operation, published a count for each — 700 for the 28, presumably supplied by Cosina — and no Japanese source publishes counts at all. The line existed because Cosina’s CEO Kobayashi (小林) wanted it to exist, and it did not sell. The Bessa R2S and R2C the lenses were built around were discontinued in April 2005; the lenses outlived them only in distributor stock, ending on a closeout sale, and a prototype SC 35mm f/1.2 Nokton Aspherical never got past three units. Optically, though, the 28 was never the point — a Japanese collector who assembled the complete S/SC set and shot the wides against the M-mount Color-Skopar on a digital body found the construction and the rendering identical, and concluded that anyone merely adapting lenses to a mirrorless camera should just buy the M-mount version. What the SC 28 offers is narrower and harder to replace: it is the only modern 28 that will go onto an SP, an S3, a Contax IIIa or a Kiev at all.