Rokkor

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Some Minolta Rokkor telephoto lenses

Rokkor was the brand name used for all lenses from Chiyoda Kōgaku Seikō and later Minolta between 1940 and 1980, including a few that were sold by other companies such as Leica .

history

The name is derived from Rokkō (六甲 山), a 932 m high mountain that could be seen from the company's factory near Mukogawa near Osaka , Japan. The company's founder, Kazuo Tashima, wanted to use the name to express the high optical quality of the lenses.

The first lens of that name was a 4.5 / 200mm lens made in 1940 for the Chiyoda SK-100 handheld aerial camera. After the brand name was abandoned in 1980/1981, the name reappeared two more times. Intern was the name in the early 1980s still in use for prototypes of a telephoto lens called / 300mm Minolta MD Apo Tele Rokkor 2.8 with manual focus and SR-bayonet, the 1985 A-mount and autofocus as Minolta AF Apo Tele 2.8 / 300mm appeared . The name was also used, this time officially, between 1996 and 1998 for the Minolta G-Rokkor 3.5 / 28mm lens. As the only Rokkor lens ever built with autofocus, this lens was part of the Minolta TC-1 , a 35 mm compact camera. For the 70th anniversary of Minolta, the lens was additionally installed in the Minolta TC-1 Limited in 1998 and produced in a limited edition of 2000 pieces with M-39 screw thread for the Japanese market.

During the period of active use of the brand name, Minolta also had its own in-house magazines called "Rokkor" in Austria and Japan.

nomenclature

In the 1960s and 1970s, lenses that were manufactured for the North American market were temporarily given the designation Rokkor-X instead of Rokkor as in the rest of the world, in order to better follow the flow of goods and dry up the gray market. Occasionally, buyers associated either the Rokkor or Rokkor-X variants with better quality, but both were based on the same specifications and quality standards in production, only the name tag was different.

By 1975, the "Rokkor" was followed by a combination of two letters from which the structure of the lens could be read. The first letter stood for the number of optical groups (T = 3, Q = 4, P = 5, H = 6, S = 7, O = 8, N = 9), the second for the number of elements (C = 3, D = 4, E = 5, F = 6, G = 7, H = 8, I = 9, J = 10, K = 11, L = 12). So a Rokkor QF lens was a lens with six elements in four groups.

proof

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Anni Rita Scheibel, Josef Scheibel: 70 years of Minolta camera technology. From the Nifcalette to the Dynax 9 . 3rd, updated, revised. u. supplementary edition. Lindemann, Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 3-89506-191-3 ( online ).
  2. ↑ Dennis Lohmann: Minolta MD APO Tele Rokkor 300mm 1: 2.8, prototype . Minolta Forum. July 1, 2006. Retrieved June 7, 2015.
  3. ↑ a b c d Antony Hands: A brief history of Minolta lenses ( English ) Rokkor Files. 2006. Accessed June 7, 2015.

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