Soligor 135mm f/3.5

Every Soligor is a whodunit. The name belonged to no factory: it was the house brand of Allied Impex Corporation, the American importer that began putting it on Japanese-made lenses in 1956, and working out who actually ground the glass behind any given Soligor is a research problem in its own right. For the rangefinder-coupled 135mm f/3.5 — offered in Nikon S, Contax RF, and Leica screw mounts — that problem long carried a confident wrong answer. The maker is now attributed to Tanaka Kogaku, the small firm behind the Tanack cameras, and the lens itself reads as a Tele-Tanar 13.5cm f/3.5 in Soligor clothes.

The old attribution held that Sankyo Koki, maker of the Komura lenses, built Soligor’s rangefinder line — a claim tracing to a long-dead website, and one that now looks wrong for this lens. The flip came from two independent directions. koiWide’s research series on early Soligor lenses compared barrels, markings, and serial habits across the rangefinder 135s and concluded that the lens derives from Tanaka Kogaku’s Tele-Tanar 13.5cm f/3.5, likely sharing its optical system, with barrels produced for Soligor branding. On Rangefinderforum, David Murphy reached the same neighborhood by handling the hardware, finding the two lenses “so similar in construction the Soligor might have been based on the Tanar” (2025). Neither party needed the other to get there, which is what makes the reattribution stick.

What a collector actually encounters is a black-and-chrome telephoto with a preset aperture and a distinctive serial style: four digits followed by a “T” (the Post-T type, observed roughly 1000–1400) or a “TN” marking (roughly 1900–2100). The two serial families turn out to conceal two optical builds — Post-T lenses carry a large rear element seated close to the mount, matching the Tele-Tanar, while TN lenses have a smaller, recessed rear element that points to a different arrangement. No release year was ever published; the late 1950s is inferred from the sister Soligor 3.5cm f/2.8, whose serials open with “58,” and Tanaka Kogaku’s failure in late 1959 would close the window from the other side.

Much of the rest is open frontier. The optical formula is unpublished, no production figures have surfaced, and no one has documented whether Nikon- and Contax-mount examples carry the small N and C codes Tanaka engraved on its own Tele-Tanars — surviving examples are scarce enough that German eBay listings flag them as rarities. For now the lens sits where the best third-party S-mount stories tend to sit: identity solved, particulars still wanted.