Noritar 240mm f/4

The Noritar 240mm f/4 was the long lens of the Norita 66 from the start. It is one of the five lenses in Graflex’s Norita brochure form 11143/1070 (read as October 1970) and in the early Norita manual that still gives the Itabashi address, and the later Operator’s Manual lists it among seven. Norita’s figures barely change between the 1970 literature and the 1972 brochure. It has 6 elements in 5 groups and stops from f/4 to f/22 with an automatic diaphragm, manual control and equidistant stops. It focuses to 3.5 m (12 ft), covers 19° across the diagonal of the 6×6 frame and 13° along each side, takes 77 mm × 0.75 screw-in filters and weighs 1,150 g. It is 175 mm long in every source. Only the diameter moves: 81.5 mm in the Graflex brochure and early manual, 82 mm in the 1972 Norita brochure table and on Topcon Club. The 1972 table also gives the weight as 40 oz where the 1970 literature has 40.5. Graflex sells it as three times the standard 80mm, and Topcon Club puts it at 144 mm in 35mm terms. The 1972 table calls it simply “Telephoto”, the word it also uses for the 160 and 400, and names no design.

It appears to have been new for the Norita. No source consulted documents a Rittron 240mm for Musashino Koki’s Rittreck 6×6. English Wikipedia, citing Hagiya, says the Rittreck’s 55, 80 and 160 became a 40 to 400 range for the Norita, and Topcon Club names only the 55 and 160 as Rittrons besides the 80. Against that, Mike Eckman writes that lenses from 40mm to 400mm were available for the Rittreck and its export version, the Warner 66. That range would take in a 240, but he names no lens and shows no Rittron 240. Topcon Club also says Norita set its focal lengths as multiples of the 80mm standard and seems to have wanted f/4 wherever it could; at three times the 80, the 240 fits both. Both Graflex and Norita advertised the f/4 against “the usual tele lens” at f/5.6, for sports and press work and for subduing backgrounds wide open. Both call it easy to hold by hand but recommend a tripod, and no maker photograph shows a tripod collar; the 400mm is the Noritar with a tripod support. The 1972 brochure gives it Cat. No. 2006, a leather case (Cat. No. 1023) and a 77 mm hood (Cat. No. 1018). The hood is listed for the 70mm and the 240mm, but the one photographed is engraved NORITA for 240, and Norita’s Japanese price list names it the hood for the 240mm. The 77 mm filters (Cat. No. 1011) are shared with the 40 and 70, and the auto extension tubes are listed for every Noritar from the 40 to the 240, the 400 not among them. The TTL metering prism’s leaflet, printed in 1973, has its meter set to f/4 for the 240. The Japanese price list asks ¥56,200 (¥51,300 tax-free), against ¥34,000 for the 160 and ¥106,700 for the 400, with ¥2,880 more for the hood. No US or Graflex price was found. No end date is recorded for the lens itself. Japanese Wikipedia has Norita 66 production ending in 1976, and Topcon Club calls 1977 the last year the camera was sold.

One version is documented and a second is reported. The ordinary lens is single-coated by pentaconsix’s account. Its front ring reads NORITAR 1:4 f=240mm, then the serial number and NORITA KOGAKU JAPAN, though no photograph found shows the whole ring. The aperture ring sits toward the front, ahead of a long metal focusing grip in alternating ribbed and plain panels, with a feet-and-metres scale and a depth-of-field scale behind it. The same barrel is photographed in the 1970 Graflex brochure and the 1972 Norita brochure. The one serial number found is 4191002, on a lens sold in Japan in September 2026. Graflex sold the same lens: the one in its brochure reads NORITAR, and no Graflex-engraved barrel turned up in any source. The MC Noritar 240 is known only at second hand. In December 2005 Selmar Meents told pentaconsix that other owners had reported MC 240mm and MC 55mm lenses, probably made in small numbers at the end of production. Pentaconsix, counting these reports, his own MC 160 and a picture of an MC 80, takes the MC line to cover every Noritar but the 70mm and 400mm, yet he also writes that practically no MC lenses are available in Norita mount. He saw no multicoated Noritar in the mid-to-late 1970s, and his MC 160mm, bought in 2006, has a diamond-grid rubber focusing ring. No source photographs an MC 240, gives its serial or marking, dates it, or confirms that it has the rubber ring of the MC 40 and 160.

The only first-hand assessment read for this page is Topcon Club’s. Its author found the 240 sharp over the whole frame from full aperture, with good colour balance and clean out-of-focus rendering, and says a 1972 camera-magazine test report had rated it highly. His complaints are its size and weight, which he calls the biggest drawback but one to put up with, and the forward aperture ring, placed to match the other Noritars and awkward to use. He still counts it a lens to keep in the bag. The Graflex and Norita brochures make their claim for definition at a distance only: “Superb image definition is a characteristic of this lens when used at infinity.” Amateur Photographer reviewed the 240 with the 40, 55 and 160 in its issue of 3 November 1971, a week after its review of the camera. Pentaconsix sums the review up as welcoming the system while finding many of the lenses not very sharp at the larger apertures and prone to flare, without singling out the 240. That review was not read for this page, and no measured figures for the lens were found. Topcon Club credits Norita’s lenses to designers who had made their names at Tōkyō Kōgaku, Maruyama Shūji, Kishimoto Tadashi and Okazaki Masayoshi among them; no source assigns this lens to any one of them.

Few seem to come up for sale. Yahoo! Auctions Japan’s closed listings, searched in late October 2026, held only one, and it came in a lot: a Norita 66 body with the 80mm f/2, the 160mm f/4 and the 240, sold for ¥124,600 on 10 September 2026, with the seller noting mould and dirt in the lenses. Look through the lens against a light for haze and fungus, and check that the diaphragm stops down to the set aperture and reopens after the shutter fires. An MC premium needs an MC marking that nobody has yet described for this focal length. With no tripod collar, a tripod-mounted outfit hangs on the camera’s own socket. The mount is the breech-lock the Norita 66 took over from the Rittreck 6×6, with the locking ring on the lens, and the same lens serves the Norita 66 and the Graflex Norita. Two other lenses can turn up under similar names. Novoflex briefly offered its PIGRIFF focusing mount in Norita mount in the mid-1970s, and one is photographed carrying the Noflexar 240mm lens head. Norita’s own 250mm f/4.5 preset Noritar is a 35mm-camera lens in M42.

Left open by the sources consulted here: the lens’s true diameter, its aperture-blade count, any cross-section or patent, whether an MC 240 exists and how it is marked, a US list price, any designer credit for this lens specifically, and which 1972 magazine tested it and what Amateur Photographer measured in 1971.