W Tanar 35mm f/2.8

Tanaka Kogaku of Kawasaki built its short life in the camera business around Tanack Leica copies and the Tanar screw-mount lenses that served them — and only twice did a Tanar reach beyond the Leica thread. The W Tanar 35mm f/2.8 was the wide-angle of that pair (the Tele-Tanar 13.5cm f/3.5 was the other), and it crossed over with a shrug that has charmed collectors since: rather than engineer separate Nikon and Contax versions, Tanaka sold one shared lens for both systems. Camera-wiki’s survey of the line states it plainly — “the same lenses were sold indifferently for both mounts” — the generous depth of field of a 35mm covering the small divergence between the two systems’ focusing helicals. It is a rare lens with a hard deadline built into its story: Tanaka failed in late 1959, and production of everything the company made ended with it.

The lens began as a Leica-screw product, launched in late 1956 at ¥15,800 for Tanaka’s own Tanack cameras, with serial numbers running from 283579 to 284468 — the 2835 prefix encoding the lens itself, 2.8 and 35mm, much as the Tele-Tanar’s 135 echoed its focal length. When the Nikon/Contax version followed is genuinely unknown. A Summer 1957 magazine survey still lists only the screw-mount version, and camera-wiki suggests the shared version was perhaps released later or made for export only; with advertisements running to June 1958 and the bankruptcy closing the window in 1959, a span of roughly 1957–59 is all the evidence supports. Known Nikon/Contax serials run only from 58543 to 58705, a block that falls inside the sequence of the chrome Tanar H.C. 5cm f/2.8 — whether Tanaka duplicated numbers is not known — and neither a domestic price nor a production figure for the version has ever surfaced.

Optically the shared version is held to be identical to the screw-mount lens, and what that optic actually is remains contested. A collector’s first-hand examination reports a Tessar type, four elements in three groups, the formula recorded here. Against it stand two claims of six elements in four groups: the table of interchangeable lenses in Shashin Kōgyō for Summer 1957 — the same table whose silence about the bayonet version dates it — and a Japanese repair specialist who stripped screw-mount examples in 2016 and 2023, measuring every group with digital calipers the second time and tracing a double-Gauss diagram from the measurements. The question is open, and an owner with the lens in hand could settle it.

The styling is the two-tone dress of the late Tanars, though the two versions wear it differently: the screw-mount lens is black on both the focus and aperture rings, with the tip, focus tab and base in chrome, while the bayonet lens blackens the focus ring and lens tip and leaves the aperture ring and base mount in chrome — dropping the focus tab and reversing the focus direction to match the ergonomics of Nikon’s and Zeiss’s own lenses. A chrome-plated version is reported to have preceded that finish. Both frame through an external black-and-chrome finder marked TANACK 35mm, and one small engraving quirk sets the 35mm lenses apart within the Tanar line: they are marked in millimetres where nearly every other Tanar reads in centimetres.

The lens also had a second identity. Soligor — the export brand under which small Japanese makers pooled their products — sold a 35mm f/2.8 for the same bayonet cameras that is essentially this lens renamed, with nothing altered but the nameplate and serial numbers continuing the same 58xxx block with a T appended. Contax-mount Soligors have been physically confirmed; a Nikon-mount one is reported but has yet to surface for inspection. A Nikon-mount Tanar brought €360 at Westlicht in 2006, and for a maker that lasted barely seven years in the camera trade, the little wide-angle proved unusually good at outliving its own name.