Mamiya N 210mm f/8 L (Mamiya 7)

The N 210mm f/8 L is the long lens of the Mamiya 7 system and the odd one out in it: a 24° telephoto that Mamiya’s manual equates to 100mm on 35mm film, sold with its own finder, focused by guesswork because it does not couple to the rangefinder. It was not one of the launch lenses. The 1995 instruction book shows only the 43, 65, 80 and 150, and the 210 first appears in the Mamiya 7 II interchangeable-lens manual beside the 50. That manual gives 7 elements in 5 groups, f/8 to f/32, closest focus 7 m at 0.032× (a field of 1750 × 2172 mm), a 58 mm filter thread that takes one filter without vignetting, a bayonet hood in the box, 125 mm long by 70 mm across (135 mm with the hood) and 480 g, which for a medium-format 210 is very little. Japanese Wikipedia agrees on 5群7枚, 7 m and φ58.

There is one version. The Mamiya 7 of June 1995 and the 7 II of January 1999 share the mount and the whole lens line, so the 210 fits both. Every Mamiya 7 lens carries its own #00 electronic leaf shutter, timed by the camera: 4 s to 1/500 and B, flash sync at every speed, and no exposure at all without the body’s battery. The manual’s instructions for the 210 are blunt: for optical reasons it cannot be coupled with the camera’s rangefinder, so the photographer judges the distance to the subject by eye and sets it on the focus ring, whose scale starts at 7 m. Composition is done in the FV704 finder supplied with the lens, a 0.89× finder with dioptre adjustment and a parallax-compensation ring that is set to the same distance; it carries bright frames for the 150 as well as the 210, and Mamiya notes it can be used with the 150 too. Wikipedia gives 2014 as the end of the system. No serial ranges, production figures or list prices were found, and no reachable source gives the lens’s own release date, which is why the 1999 first year here is this project’s inference and is flagged as such.

Few people have used it, and the one who writes about it at length is candid about the trade. Matt Osborne lists the faff: no 210 frame in the body’s finder, no rangefinder coupling, focus by hyperfocal distance or by reading the distance off a digital Leica and dialling it into the Mamiya. Then: ‘despite all the mentioned faff using the Mamiya 7 210 lens I love it’, because it gives him a telephoto for landscapes and hiking at a third of the weight of a Hasselblad with a Sonnar 180, and all the Mamiya 7 lenses are sharp. His caution elsewhere is that f/8 is no use for freezing movement or for anything but bright light, so it is not a wildlife lens. Michael Nguyen lists it as the long end of a lineup of sharp lenses; Jorge Ferrufino gives the construction and puts the line’s limits at its slow apertures and long close focus. Theo at Photo Thinking could not find the finder when he tried the system in 2019 and has still not used the lens. A Flickr group thread from 2007 sums up the reputation: rarely seen, as good as the other Mamiya 7 lenses, and used by hikers for things far enough away that guessing the distance does not matter, which at f/8, 7 m and beyond is most things.

What to check when buying: that the FV704 finder and its parallax ring are present and the ring turns, since the finder is specific to the lens and the expensive part to replace; the bayonet hood; the gold-plated contacts on the rear mount, since aperture and shutter are driven electronically and a dirty contact stops the exposure; that the shutter fires at every speed on a body with a fresh battery; the glass against a bright light for haze and balsam separation, which owners report on the 80; and the barrel, which is light and partly plastic, the standing complaint about Mamiya 7 lenses set against glass that nobody complains about. Test the focus scale against a known distance, because there is no rangefinder to catch a shifted helicoid. What remains open: the month the 210 shipped, why Mamiya could not couple it, its designer, its price, and how many were made.