Hansa Canon

The Hansa Canon is the camera Canon began with, and it is not entirely a Canon. The Precision Optical Instruments Laboratory — Seiki Kōgaku, founded in November 1933 — had shown the Kwanon as a prototype in 1934 and never sold one. What reached the market instead, in February 1936 by Canon’s own dating, was a camera whose body and focal-plane shutter the laboratory built itself and whose entire optical half came from Nippon Kogaku: the Nikkor 5cm f/3.5, the bayonet lens mount with its focusing helix, the rangefinder mechanism and the viewfinder optics. Canon’s museum lists the division of labour plainly, and camera-wiki puts it more bluntly still — Canon made “the body and mechanisms,” Nikon supplied the rest.

The name Canon itself came from the prototype. Kwanon, the 1934 camera that was never sold, was named for the Buddhist bodhisattva of mercy; Canon is what that became when the company wanted a word the rest of the world could read. Canon’s own museum gives the reasoning, and it is stranger than the anglicisation suggests: the word was chosen because “Canon” also refers to the Bible and standards or laws. A camera named for a Buddhist deity was renamed for Christian scripture and for the idea of a measuring standard, at a company that would spend the next ninety years making instruments.

The name on the top plate belongs to neither of them. “Hansa” was the trademark of Omiya Shashin Yōhin, the wholesaler that held exclusive distribution, and it appears on the cameras that went out through Omiya’s dealers. Cameras sold directly from the factory carry no such marking, and they are the scarcer thing: Mike Eckman’s survey of surviving examples puts Hansa-marked bodies ahead of plain ones by three or four to one. Both are the same camera. The collector name for the model as a whole, when the distinction is not the point, is simply the Canon Original.

Production ran from about October 1935 to about June 1940 and came to roughly 1,100 cameras, a figure that comes from collectors rather than from any factory record — Canon’s own history publishes none. Within that run there were three revisions, and the only way to place a camera among them is the first digit of the serial number stamped inside the base plate. No source consulted says what changed at each step. A second and unrelated serial appears on the lens mount, because Nippon Kogaku numbered its mounts in a sequence of their own; the two never correspond. That sequence has conspicuous gaps, which the collector literature explains by the difficulty Nippon Kogaku had machining the mount at all — many were scrapped before they were ever fitted to a camera. On the earliest of them, “Nippon Kogaku” is engraved beside the number, a practice that stops before number 800.

The mount was its own island. Outwardly it resembles the internal bayonet of the Zeiss Ikon Contax, and it fits nothing else; only the 5cm Nikkor was ever offered for it commercially, though a 3.5cm f/3.5 Nikkor was prototyped and never produced. The successors kept close to it — the Canon S of 1938, the J of 1939, the NS of 1940 — until Canon moved after the war to a 39mm thread that accepts most Leica-thread lenses, and the original bayonet ended with the cameras built for it.

What remains open is most of the detail a collector would want. Nobody has published what separates the three revisions, or when in the run the Hansa marking stopped, or a serial range for either version. Canon’s museum gives dimensions of 13.5 × 6.8 × 4.5 cm and a weight of about 650 g and a price of ¥275 with a case, and almost every other number attached to this camera is an estimate made by someone counting survivors.