Glass Bodies a variant-level encyclopedia of vintage lenses and cameras by iwillpat

Nokton 50mm f/1.5 (1950)

Voigtländer · Contax RF + LTM · 1950

Known as “Old Nokton”

Also known as: Nokton 50mm f/1.5 · Nokton 1.5/50 · Nokton 1:1,5/50 · Nokton 5cm f/1.5 · Voigtländer Nokton 50mm f1.5 Prominent · Old Nokton 50mm f/1.5 · ノクトン 50mm F1.5

Variants & identification

Variant Mount Years Serial ranges Production
Leica screw mount, rangefinder-coupled LTM 1950–1952 3157758 — c.1950 (OstLicht, spring 2024, sold €6,000)
3161601 — 1950 (Ichikawa's first lens)
3275365 — 1952 (Leitz Auction 41, 'Version 1', unsold at €2,800–3,200)
3339511 — 1952 (Leitz Auction 39, 'Version 1', unsold at €4,000–4,500)
3339596 — 1952 (Ichikawa's second lens) 		No figure published; CameraQuest calls it one of the rarest Leica-screw lenses, and every dated example so far sits in 1950–52
Contax rangefinder mount Contax RF — — No figure published and no dated example found; 'even fewer' than the Leica-screw lens (CameraQuest), 'said to be the rarest one' (camera-wiki)
  1. Where the Prominent lens is on this page. The great majority of Noktons were made in Voigtländer's own Prominent bayonet (Gandy), a mount nothing else in this catalog uses, so the page files the lens under the two system mounts it was also sold in and keeps the Prominent lens here, in the notes. Tahusa counts five Prominent-mount versions, told apart by the colour of the aperture ring and tail, blue or amber coating, barrel style and a 47 or 49 mm diameter, with slot-in filters on the early ones and threads later; Flashback Camera dates an 'early' one to 1955 and NOCTO's example (#3538159) weighs 226 g. A fourth mount existed too: the Rectaflex, for which fortia says the optics were recomputed, and Flashback calls 'slightly different'. Neither source says how.
  2. Construction. Seven elements is agreed. Five groups is what the dealers and Lens Legend give and what the 2-1-1 | 2-1 layout in the Lens Legend diagram shows; Tronnier's two US patents of 1950 describe the front half as two pairs of opposed menisci and the rear as a diverging glass, a collecting glass and a final positive glass, which Google's summary counts as four groups. The patents claim the design for apertures beyond f/1.6 and give f/1.5 as the worked example. Lens Legend says the rear element is radioactive; nobody else on this page tests it.
  3. Weight and size are quoted for the Leica-thread lens, which carries its own helicoid: 49 mm long, 51 mm across, 12½ oz (Gandy). The Prominent lens, with no helicoid, is 226 g (NOCTO). Minimum focus is 1 m on the coupled lens; Flashback's 0.7 m is a modified adapter, not the lens.
  4. Prices. The Prominent with the Nokton listed at $279.50 in the United States against $229.50 with the f/2 Ultron (Eckman, from a 1957 advertisement), fifty dollars for the extra two-thirds of a stop. Today the split is between mounts: a Prominent-mount lens with an adapter is about $1,000–1,200 (Tahusa, 2024) and ¥88,000 at NOCTO; the Leica-thread lens is the one that runs past $5,000 — OstLicht hammered one at €6,000 in 2024 while Leitz failed to sell two at €2,800–4,500 estimates. No Contax-mount sale is on record.
  5. The homage. Cosina's Nokton 50mm f/1.5 Aspherical of 1999 borrowed this lens's name, scalloped ring and chrome, and the S Nokton of 2003 put the same modern glass in Nikon S mount; neither shares a surface with Tronnier's design. The page for the 1999 lens excludes 'Prominent' from its listings on purpose, which is why this one exists.
How to tell them apart (expand)
  • Engraved NOKTON 1:1,5/50 with Voigtländer's comma, and 15 aperture blades behind the front glass
  • A 45 mm filter thread the dealers call odd — on later Prominent-mount lenses an inner 49 mm thread as well; the earliest Prominent lenses took Voigtländer's slot-in filters and had no thread
  • The Prominent-mount lens has no focusing ring at all: the body's top-plate knob moves the whole lens

Leica screw mount, rangefinder-coupled:

  • Its own focusing helicoid and a Leica cam, unlike the Prominent lens, which has neither
  • Heavy chrome-plated brass: 49 mm long at infinity, 51 mm across the rear, about 354 g (Gandy's 12½ oz)
  • Leitz Auction's 'Version 1' label — the house has not described a second

Contax rangefinder mount:

  • Inner Contax bayonet, focusing through the body's helical like a Sonnar; camera-wiki gives no further description
  • Beware the fakes: Kiev-mount conversions in a Nokton barrel, mostly from Warsaw, are offered as Contax-mount Noktons (camera-wiki)

Serial-range notes

315xxxx–334xxxx
Voigtländer's lens numbering runs through every lens the firm made, so a Nokton is dated from the company table, not its own run: 1951 begins near 3,220,000, 1952 at 3,300,500, 1953 at 3,461,400, 1954 at 3,600,000, 1955 at 3,731,000 and 1956 at 4,001,000 (Wilkinson and Glanfield via camera-wiki). The five Leica-thread lenses above fall in 1950–52; a Prominent-mount lens at 3538159 is 1953–54.

Specifications

Formula
Double Gauss, Tronnier's modified form — 7e/5g (dealers, Lens Legend); the 1950 patents describe seven glasses in four groups
Designed by
Albrecht Wilhelm Tronnier — optical design — Swiss priority 16 January 1950, US patents 2,645,155 and 2,646,721 filed 12 September 1950, assigned to Voigtländer & Sohn, Braunschweig
Construction
7 elements / 5 groups
Aperture range
f/1.5–f/16
Diaphragm blades
15
Min. focus
1 m
Weight
354 g
Filter
45 mm
Years manufactured
1950–1960
Country
Germany
Coating
Single-coated; a 1950 lens shows cyan and amber coatings, a 1952 lens cyan only (Ichikawa)

What reviewers say

History

Albrecht Wilhelm Tronnier had designed Schneider’s Xenon in the 1930s and came to Voigtländer as its scientific adviser in 1944. The Nokton is what he drew for the firm’s new rangefinder: a modified double Gauss of seven glasses, filed in Switzerland on 16 January 1950 and in the United States that September, assigned to Voigtländer & Sohn of Braunschweig. It went on sale in 1950 as the top lens for the Prominent, a camera that focuses from a knob on its top plate and carries its lenses on a bayonet of its own, so the Nokton in that mount has no focusing ring at all. Fifteen aperture blades, a 45 mm filter thread the dealers still call odd, and chrome plated thick enough that Gandy thought the barrel had been machined from steel.

The Prominent took almost all of them. A few were made with their own helicoid and a Leica cam for the screw-mount Leicas and their copies, and fewer again with a Contax bayonet; the Rectaflex got a version with, by two Japanese accounts, different optics. The Leica-thread lens is the one with a record: five dated examples between 1950 and 1952, two of them failing to sell at Leitz against four-figure estimates while OstLicht found €6,000 for a third. The Contax lens has no record at all beyond the statement that it exists and is the rarest, and the caution that goes with it, that Kiev-mount conversions in Nokton barrels are sold as the real thing. Most “Contax Noktons” in use are Prominent lenses on an adapter.

Used, the lens is a 1950 f/1.5 and behaves like one. The centre is sharp wide open and the corners are not; backgrounds swirl and highlights go to lemons at the edges; the early coating flares hard into the sun, and everything tightens by f/2.8. Ichikawa, who shot a 1950 lens and a 1952 one side by side, calls the rendering respectable for its date and notes that the coating changed between them. Cosina revived the name in 1999 with an aspherical lens that borrowed this one’s scalloped ring and nothing else.

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This history is AI-written, from the sources listed at the foot of the page. Where the record is silent it says so rather than filling the gap — but no human wrote these sentences.

Example photos

Sample photo wanted — shot with a Nokton 50mm f/1.5 (1950)? We'd love to feature it (with credit).

Live listings

Asking price, USD: a median of $1,100 across 15 fixed-price listings on 2026-10-30 (middle half $720–$1,300). First day tracked.

Asking prices from the listings scanned, not sales; junk-flagged rows and auction lots excluded; other currencies are not converted.

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Related: Nokton 50mm f/1.5 Aspherical · S Nokton 50mm f/1.5 Aspherical · Xenon 5cm f/1.5 · Sonnar 5cm f/1.5 · Summarit 5cm f/1.5 · Canon 50mm f/1.5

Sources (14)

Every page here is assembled from public sources, and the gaps are real ones. If you own this lens, know a serial number I'm missing, or can see where I have it wrong, tell me — corrections, serials and sample photos are all worth having.