SC-Skopar 35mm f/2.5

In February 2001 Cosina did what no manufacturer had done in thirty-seven years: it announced brand-new wide-angle lenses for the Nikon S and classic Zeiss Contax rangefinders, mounts that had gone out of production in 1963 and 1961 respectively. The 35mm f/2.5 was the longest of the original SC-Skopar trio — 21mm f/4, 25mm f/4, 35mm f/2.5, with the 28mm f/3.5 following only in September 2003 — and the hyphen in S-C carries the whole idea: S for the Nikon S series, C for the classic Contax, a single lens that fits both, and the Soviet Kiev copies besides. Nikon had copied the Contax bayonet and its back focus but not its rotation from close-up to infinity, a divergence Shutterbug put at 268 degrees on one mount against 277 on the other over the same travel to 0.9m. On a fast or long lens that gap shows up as missed focus. At 35mm and f/2.5 the depth of field simply swallows it — which is why the wides could be one shared lens while the 50mm and 85mm Voigtländers that came later had to be built Nikon-only.

Stephen Gandy, the US distributor, opened a box of pre-production 21s, 25s and 35s in early June 2001 and drove down to Long Beach to photograph the retired Queen Mary with them mounted on black motorised Nikon SPs; production lenses reached buyers that October at $319. Optically it is the Leica-mount Color-Skopar 35mm f/2.5 transplanted — seven elements in five groups, multi-coated, and one of the first three multi-coated wide angles ever sold for either mount. The physical lens is deliberately of a piece with the cameras it serves: 141 grams, a 43mm filter thread shared with Nikon’s own 21mm f/4, 28mm f/3.5, the three vintage 3.5cm lenses, the 50mm f/1.4 and the 135mm f/3.5, 0.9m close focus, a screw-in hood that interchanges with the 25mm. It rides the outer of the body’s two three-claw bayonets and focuses through the index-finger wheel, which turns the entire lens — hence the two aperture scales, one always facing you — and Cosina included a slip-over collar for anyone who preferred to grip the barrel. Gandy’s verdict on first handling was that the thing is astonishingly heavily built, of a piece with the classic Nikon rangefinder wides.

The lenses arrived before there was a new camera to put them on: the Bessa R2S and R2C, the first rangefinders ever made in these mounts with through-the-lens metering, only appeared at Photokina in 2002. For a year the SC-Skopars existed purely to be bolted onto forty-year-old Nikons, Contaxes and Kievs. Cosina scheduled a single run of 700 for the 35mm f/2.5 and, sales having disappointed, never ordered a second; a 35mm f/1.2 SC Nokton Aspherical got as far as three prototypes before Cosina cancelled it for the same reason, and the SC line was eventually discontinued and cleared at closeout. Every production figure for the whole SC family — 900, 800, 700, and the rest — comes from CameraQuest, and Gandy alone published them; no Japanese source puts a number to these lenses, so the counts stand on one distributor’s word.

Reception has been quietly consistent across two decades. Hicks, reviewing the R2S in 2003, dared to whisper that most or all of the new Voigtländers were better than the forty- and fifty-year-old Nikkors they joined, and named this lens and the 50mm f/1.5 Nokton as the two he would leave mounted on the camera. In 2021, surveying every 35mm a Nikon rangefinder owner can buy, davidde called it an excellent lens and probably the best overall S-mount 35mm. The reference databases have been less attentive — thelensdb’s S-mount list omits the lens entirely, which is part of why it is easy to miss. One warning for buyers: the same 35mm f/2.5 optics were sold in Leica mount under the Color-Skopar name, and that is the lens most listings mean. The SC is the one engraved SC-Skopar, on the three-claw external bayonet, coupled to the camera’s focusing wheel, and a listing that says only “Voigtländer 35mm f/2.5 Skopar” is almost certainly not it.