Soligor 3.5cm f/2.8

For years the Soligor 3.5cm f/2.8 came with an asterisk that could not be removed. It is almost certainly not a Soligor design at all but Tanaka Kogaku’s W Tanar 35mm f/2.8 wearing a different nameplate — “just the nameplate changed,” in the judgment of the koiWide research series — and it was said to have been offered for both Nikon and Contax rangefinders. Only the Contax half could be proved: those examples exist and have been tested on bodies, while every lens ever advertised as the Nikon version turned out, on inspection, to be a C-engraved Contax lens. The Nikon version has now surfaced. A photographed example, serial 58838, carries an unmistakable N engraved on its chrome mount ring — and the listing it appeared in never mentioned the letter at all.

Soligor was an import brand — the house name of Allied Impex, in use from 1956 — that commissioned its lenses from Japanese makers rather than building them. For this wide-angle the trail leads firmly to Tanaka: beyond koiWide’s nameplate observation, rangefinderforum observers independently noted that the Soligor barrel matches the Tanar’s construction, and the Leica-screw Accurar 35mm f/2.8 appears to be the same lens under yet a third name. Where other Soligor-branded models received restyled barrels, this one kept the Tanar’s appearance essentially unchanged, and it even continues Tanaka’s serial series: known examples run 58xxx with a “T” suffix, plausibly placing production in 1958. Soligor published no optical data of its own, but if the rebadge is as literal as it looks, the glass is the Tanar’s six elements in four groups — a double Gauss, on the reading of a Summer 1957 manufacturer’s spec table and a repair specialist who has had the lens apart twice.

What looks at first like one dual-mount lens is in fact two separate versions — though the opposite idea has a respectable pedigree. Camera-wiki’s account of the Tanar line states that “the same lenses were sold indifferently for both mounts,” the reasoning being that a 35mm’s depth of field swallows the small helical divergence between the Nikon and Contax systems. It is a plausible story, it is repeated widely, and it is the one claim in that survey with no source attached to it. The marketplace, meanwhile, has muddied the distinction for years. Coastal Film Lab sold a Contax example at $699.99 under a “Nikon Contax Rangefinder Mount” title that was seller phrasing, not a description of the bayonet; a lens David Murphy bought on eBay in 2007 as a Nikon-mount example turned out to be a C version. Then in 2024 David Murphy put a C-engraved example on a Nikon SP and reported that it would not mount, though it seated without complaint on a Contax IIa and a Bessa R2C. That is worth stating carefully, because it is odder than it sounds: Nikon copied the Contax bayonet closely enough that wide-angles routinely cross between the systems, and the usual complaint is that a Contax lens focuses imprecisely on a Nikon body, not that it refuses to go on at all. No source explains what physically obstructs it, and the report rests on one collector and one pair of bodies. Taken at face value it means separate Nikon and Contax versions rather than one lens fitting both — which the N-engraved example above independently supports — but the mechanism is unexplained and a second test would settle it.

What the N does not do is make the lenses easy to tell apart. Both versions wear the same barrel, the same nameplate and serials from the same 58xxx block, so the block itself identifies nothing; the single engraved letter on the mount is the whole difference, and it is small enough that sellers routinely miss it — the confirmed Nikon example was offered by someone who evidently had not noticed what they had. Anyone shopping for one should read the mount rather than the title. What remains genuinely open is smaller now, and duller: how many were made, what Soligor charged for them, and whether the optical formula really is the Tanar’s six elements in four groups, which nobody has confirmed on a Soligor-badged lens.