Nikkor-Q(·C) 13.5cm f/3.5

The Nikkor-Q(·C) 13.5cm f/3.5 was the longest lens a Nikon rangefinder could focus, and the standard telephoto of the S system for its entire mature life. Saburo Murakami (村上三郎), who had designed the 13.5cm f/4 it replaced, reworked his own formula a fraction faster: the design was completed in December 1950 — not 1949, a date that still circulates — and the first batch of roughly 330 Made-in-Occupied-Japan lenses followed in January 1951 under factory order 5006 (Rotoloni). A Sonnar-type telephoto of four elements in three groups behind a 43mm filter thread, it then stayed in the catalog for over a decade, to a final batch in 1962 — around 30,000 lenses across all mounts, which puts it among the most-produced S-Nikkors of any focal length.

Its predecessor carried real history. The 13.5cm f/4, designed by Murakami in autumn 1946 as a close derivative of the Zeiss Sonnar, was one of Nippon Kogaku’s original postwar consumer lenses, and by Nikon’s own account it was the lens David Douglas Duncan bought after tests convinced him it outperformed his German glass — part of the Korean War-era reporting that made Nikkor’s reputation. But the f/4 was short-lived: Murakami’s f/3.5 recalculation superseded it within a few years and became, in Nikon’s words, “a standard NIKKOR lens for the S Series.” At 135mm it sat right at the practical limit of what a rangefinder could focus accurately, which is exactly why every serious S-system kit ended with one.

The production run reads like a compressed history of 1950s Nippon Kogaku. Serial batches were shared between Nikon S and Leica screw mounts from the first MIOJ batch onward — Leica-screw examples are documented inside the same ranges, and no per-mount split was ever published; batches appear S-mount-only from ~275901 (the J.PAT-engraving era, ~1957 on), implying screw-mount production ended around 275xxx. Along the way the beauty ring changed from “Tokyo” to “Nippon Kogaku Japan,” the minimum aperture went from f/16 to f/32, and in July 1956 the ~520g chrome-over-brass barrel gave way to the black “new style” in aluminum at ~405g. The ·C was dropped from the engraving at ~272734, and the final 1962 batch is marked 135mm rather than 13.5cm. C-marked Contax-mount examples are physically confirmed (serials 253942, 263736, 267906), and even a lone Exakta example (262914) is documented, though no factory figures for either exist. The ~30,000 total triangulates from three directions: Pacific Rim’s “nearly 30,000,” the NHS Kiu–Rotoloni registry’s 30k, and about 28,720 summed from the known serial spans.

The design outlived the system that created it. When Nikon moved to the F, the Nikkor-Q 13.5cm f/3.5 Auto of 1959 was, per Richard Haw, largely based on this lens with a slightly revised formula — the start of a 135mm f/3.5 line that Nikon kept in production through the Ai-S version of the early 1980s. Shooters today find much of what the 1950s buyers did: a natural, low-element-count rendering that is sharp centrally even wide open and excellent stopped down, undone only by era-typical flare when the sun sits just outside the frame — the deep original hood was, and remains, essential equipment.