Noritar 40mm f/4

The Noritar 40mm f/4 is the widest lens Norita Kōgaku made for the Norita 66, and the only one its literature calls super-wide: 88° across the diagonal of the 6×6 frame and 68° along each side, which Topcon Club puts at the equivalent of 24 mm on 35mm and P. Lynn Miller at about 21 mm. It has 9 elements in 8 groups and stops from f/4 to f/22 with an automatic diaphragm and equidistant stops. It focuses to 0.3 m (1 ft), takes 77 mm × 0.75 screw-in filters and weighs 640 g. Topcon Club calls it a retrofocus with a large front element. These figures are the same in the 1970 Graflex brochure, the early Norita manual and the 1972 Norita brochure. Only the length moves: the first two give 90 mm × 80 mm diameter, the 1972 table 80 mm × 99 mm, and no source explains the difference. Graflex and Norita both call the lens compact, and pentaconsix calls it “quite compact”; Topcon Club finds its size well matched to the body, but says the big front element and 77 mm filter make it look imposing once mounted.

It was in the system from the start. Graflex’s brochure, form 11143/1070, and the early Norita manual, which has the Itabashi address and covers five lenses, both print its full specification. Graflex calls it a “second-generation” wide-angle design computed for the Norita 66, a “high speed” super-wide whose f/4 makes focusing easier, and advises a spirit level to keep straight lines straight. No Rittron 40mm is documented for the 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. The “40mm to 400mm” range that Mike Eckman gives for the Rittreck, and camera-wiki for the Rittreck and Norita together, names no individual lens. The 1972 brochure shows the 40 fitted to the body as the NORITA 66 SUPER WIDE, Cat. No. 2001, claims “minimal distortion” for it, and lists a leather case for it among the accessories. Norita’s Japanese price list, found with the 1972 Japanese catalogue, asks ¥66,000 (¥60,200 tax-free). Of the Norita 66 lenses only the 400mm cost more, at ¥106,700 (the same list’s 135mm f/1.4 for 35mm cameras was ¥86,700), and the 80mm f/2 cost ¥25,200, so the 40 was over two and a half times the price of the standard lens. No US or Graflex price was found. Asahi Camera’s New Face column tested the Norita 66 with the 80 and the 40 in May 1972 (No. 179), and Amateur Photographer reviewed the 40, 55, 160 and 240 on 3 November 1971; neither review was read for this page. Japanese Wikipedia has Norita stopping the camera, and leaving the consumer camera and lens business, in 1976; Mike Eckman and Topcon Club have the Norita 66 still being sold in 1977.

Two versions are reported. The ordinary lens is single-coated and has a knurled metal focusing ring. Its front ring reads NORITAR 1:4 f=40mm, then the serial number, then NORITA KOGAKU JAPAN. The lens in the 1972 brochure photograph is number 4140442, the only serial found. 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 rests on one owner, Selmar Meents. In December 2005 he told pentaconsix that he had owned two multicoated 40s, “marked as such”, with diamond-grid rubber on the focusing ring, and that the MC lenses were probably made in small numbers at the end of production. The pentaconsix author writes that none of the lenses was multicoated when they were weighing up the Norita in the mid-to-late 1970s, but in 2006 acquired a 160mm labelled MC with the same rubber ring. No source dates the MC 40, records its exact marking, gives a serial, or says whether anything changed besides the coating and the ring.

The fullest first-hand report found is Topcon Club’s. Wide open the corners lose contrast and show spherical aberration, but by f/8 the whole frame is very good, and the author calls the sharpness outstanding and the lens good enough for everyday use for anyone who likes wide angles. P. Lynn Miller, posting a full-frame scan to Flickr’s Norita Council group in 2008, found very little distortion but the flare he expected of a single-coated lens, and called it “an impressive hunk of brass and glass, which performs very well for its age”. Not everyone agrees on sharpness: in the same thread norfoot calls the 40 “the softest of all normal Noritar lenses”, while admitting he misses the one he sold. Pentaconsix sums up Amateur Photographer’s 1971 test as finding many of the lenses not very sharp at the larger apertures and prone to flare, without singling out the 40. Topcon Club credits the Noritar line as a whole to three designers who made their names at Tōkyō Kōgaku, 丸山修治 (Maruyama Shūji, as camera-wiki reads it), 岸本匡 and 岡崎正義. It gives the names in kanji only, and no source assigns this lens to any one of them.

For a buyer, the first check is which version it is. An MC premium needs both the MC marking and the rubber ring, since for the 40mm neither is documented beyond Meents’s description. Neither the 1972 brochure nor the Japanese price list offers a hood for the 40mm: the brochure’s 77 mm hood is listed for the 70 and 240 only, and Topcon Club warns that a filter and a screw-in hood together cut the corners slightly, so use one or the other. The mount is the Norita 66 breech-lock inherited from the Rittreck, and the lens serves the Norita 66 and the Graflex Norita alike. As with any lens of this age, look through it against a light for haze and fungus, and check that the diaphragm closes to the set aperture and reopens after the shutter fires. Few change hands: searches of Yahoo! Auctions Japan found only two closed sales in the 180 days to 26 October 2026, at ¥57,000 on 10 September and ¥63,388 on 4 October.

Left open by the sources consulted here: the lens’s true length, its aperture-blade count, any cross-section or patent, the date, marking and serial numbers of the MC version, a US list price, any designer credit for this lens specifically, and what Asahi Camera and Amateur Photographer actually measured.