Auto Rikenon Zoom 70-230mm f/4.5 (M42)

The Auto Rikenon Zoom 70-230mm f/4.5 was the longest and heaviest of the three zooms Ricoh offered for its M42 screw-mount reflexes. Ricoh’s lens table in the Auto TLS EE instruction book gives it thirteen elements in eight groups, an angle of view from 34° to 11°, a 67 mm filter, a closest focus of 2.5 m and a weight of 1,300 g. The other two were the 90-190mm f/5.8 and the 55-135mm f/3.5. The 70-230mm and the 90-190mm both appear in the accessory-lens lists of the Singlex TLS and TLS 401 instruction books, so both were on offer while those bodies were current; of the three books, only the later Auto TLS EE table lists the 55-135mm, which the SLX 500 book lists too. No launch date has been found: the 1967 on this page is the year Ricoh gives for the Singlex TLS (June 1967), its first M42 body, and the undated TLS book that lists the lens may be a later printing.

It is an ordinary automatic-diaphragm M42 lens and fits every Ricoh screw-mount body, as well as any other M42 camera. On the Singlex TLS and TLS 401, which meter through the lens at the taking aperture, it is used stopped down. The Auto TLS EE gives shutter-priority automation only with Ricoh’s EE lenses; the accessory-lens table in its instruction book names four, the 28, 35, 135 and 200mm, and no zoom. Ricoh says ordinary M42 lenses work on that camera with manual coupling. Sears’s manual for its version of the camera, the Sears Auto TLS, describes two ways to meter a non-EE screw lens that opens to f/5.6 or wider, which the f/4.5 zoom does: at full aperture, by setting the camera’s lens-selection dial and transferring the needle’s f-number to the aperture ring, or stopped down with the preview switch. The export SLX 500 and Singlex II of 1975–76 take it as well. Ricoh’s camera list credits both with open-aperture metering, but their own instruction books have the user meter stopped down, with the preview lever or button pressed. Ricoh’s Nikon F-mount Singlex of 1962 is a different mount, and so are the K-mount XR bodies of 1977 onward and their XR Rikenon and Rikenon P zooms.

Who made it is not recorded in any Ricoh document, so a similar zoom under another brand cannot be assumed to be the same lens: check for the Rikenon name on the front ring as well as the screw mount, the 67 mm filter thread and the 2.5 m end of the distance scale. At 1,300 g it is a heavy lens to hang from a camera’s mount. Look for wear in the zoom and focus movement and for haze between the thirteen elements, and check that the diaphragm springs closed smartly when the auto pin is pressed. No Sears-badged version has been found.