Nikkor-S(·C) 8.5cm f/1.5

Domon Ken (土門拳) and Kimura Ihei (木村伊兵衛), the two towering documentary photographers of postwar Japan, both adopted this lens — Kimura so devotedly that it came to be called “Kimura Ihei’s trusted blade” (木村伊兵衛の懐刀). At a time when only Leica glass carried real prestige, the fastest telephoto Nippon Kogaku had ever built did as much as any lens to establish Nikkor’s reputation: a 564-gram Sonnar with a sixteen-bladed, near-circular iris, made in barely 1,353 examples across three rangefinder mounts, and unsurpassed in speed among 85mm Nikkors until the 85mm f/1.4 Ai-S arrived in 1981 — twenty-eight years on.

Nothing about it came easily. The optical design was begun by Murakami Saburo (村上三郎) and carried to completion by Wakimoto Zenji (脇本善司), who inherited the project and tightened its aberration correction. The first trial blueprint was drawn in July 1950, the drawings were redone eight times into 1952, and seven distinct trial lenses were built along the way — including experiments at f/1.4 and with a four-element cemented group — before the design settled as a Sonnar of seven elements in three groups: a large front element ahead of two cemented triplets, in effect an oversized sibling of the Nikkor-S·C 5cm f/1.4. A January 1951 introduction date still circulates from period dealer literature, but Nikon’s own development chronology and the earliest serials — the main block opens in January 1953 — place actual production two years later.

All three mounts were serialized together in a single block beginning at 264301, the versions differing internally only by a focusing shim; the Contax lens is identified by nothing more than an engraved C on the barrel. Unusually for a rangefinder-era telephoto Nikkor, the fronts differ too: the S-mount version wears a flared barrel taking 62mm filters, while the Leica version has a straight nose with hood lugs, a tripod foot, and a 58mm thread, and a small Leica-only block appeared late in the run at 367001, marked plain S in the post-1956 manner. Every one of them left the factory in black paint with a chrome mount collar — this is one of the few Nikon rangefinder lenses never offered in chrome at all, which is why a “rare black example” in a sales listing is simply the ordinary lens. (The chrome-versus-black story belongs to its slower stablemate, the 8.5cm f/2, which began all-chrome and later went black.) Factory records count 685 S-mount, 489 Leica, and 179 Contax lenses — 1,353 in all — though the serial spans imply closer to 1,750 and period literature claimed about 2,000, so the true total remains contested. What kept every figure small was the price: $299.50 in the United States at introduction against $175 for the 8.5cm f/2, with that sixteen-blade iris alone costly to manufacture, so the lens most photographers dreamed of was one few could buy.

Adapted to modern cameras it shows two distinct personalities, and that is precisely its appeal. Wide open it renders with a delicate, transparent glow — heavy vignetting, visible chromatic aberration, and gloriously oversized ghosts included — that photographers have always read as flattering rather than flawed; stopped down it cleans up almost completely by f/2.8 and turns genuinely sharp by f/4, fine-lined enough for a 60-megapixel sensor. The same double character that once softened coarse-grained film portraits now makes it one of the rare early Nikkors whose reputation has grown, not shrunk, in the digital era.