Rokkor was a brand name used for all Chiyoda Kōgaku Seikō and later Minolta lenses between 1940 and 1980, including a few which were marketed and sold by other companies like Leica. The name was derived from the name of Rokkō (六甲山), a 932 m high mountain, which could be seen from the company's glass-making and optics factory at Mukogawa near Osaka, Japan. The company's founder wanted the name to symbolize the high quality in optics.
Overview
The first lens to carry the Rokkor designation was a 200mm 4.5 lens that came with the hand-holdable aerial camera Chiyoda SK-100 in 1940. After the Rokkor name was dropped and no longer engraved in new lenses after 1980/1981, the Rokkor name resurfaced two times. As was revealed not before 2006, the Rokkor name was still used internally for prototypes of a never released SR-mount Minolta MD Apo Tele Rokkor 300mm 2.8 manual-focus lens in the early 1980s, a lens design, which later saw life as the A-mount Minolta AF Apo Tele 300mm 2.8 G in 1985, a non-Rokkor auto-focus lens. The Rokkor name was also resurrected for a short time between 1996 and 1998 for the Minolta G-Rokkor 28mm 3.5 lens. As the only officially released auto-focus Rokkor ever, this lens was incorporated into the Minolta TC-1 135 film compact camera. To celebrate Minolta's 70th anniversary in 1998, the same optics were also used in the Minolta TC-1 Limited as well as in a Leica thread-mount version of the lens in a limited production run of 2000 units for the Japanese market only.
When the brand was still used by Minolta, there were also printed Minolta magazines named "ROKKOR" in Austria and Japan.
The brand was so well respected among photographers that some customers asked for "Rokkor cameras" and questioned the origin of the lenses when the first Minolta lenses without the Rokkor designation hit the market between 1977 and 1980. Many continued to call at least the manual-focus Minolta SR-mount lenses "Rokkors" long after the name was dropped. Even decades later, when Sony took over the A-mount auto-focus SLR system from Konica Minolta
Specialist types of Rokkor lenses
Super Rokkor, Boen Rokkor, Fish-Eye Rokkor, VFC Rokkor, Shift CA Rokkor, Varisoft Rokkor, Bellows Micro Rokkor, Micro Rokkor, Bellows Macro Rokkor, Macro Rokkor, Tele Rokkor, RF Rokkor, Zoom Rokkor, Rokkor-TC, Rokkor-TD, TV Zoom Rokkor.
- E.Rokkor - lenses for enlargers with Leica thread-mount
- C.E.Rokkor/C.E.Rokkor-X - lenses for color enlargers with Leica thread-mount
- F.Rokkor - for fax machines or copiers?
- R.Rokkor - for microfiche / repro systems?
- W.Rokkor/W.Rokkor-X - Wide-angle lenses with SR-mount
- UW.Rokkor - Ultra-wide angle lenses with SR-mount
- P-Rokkor - slide projection lenses
- G-Rokkor - a combination of Minolta's "G" (gold) designation for high-end lenses and the Rokkor brand, the only lens to carry this designation is the Minolta G-Rokkor 28mm 3.5 in the TC-1 as well as with Leica thread-mount
List of Rokkor lenses for 35mm cameras
- Notes
See also
External links
- Lens specifications – The Minolta User Group (MUG)
- Rokkor Digital
References
- As noted, a mixture of Latin numerals and Greek numerical prefixes to ensure a unique letter for each value.^
- Obiettivi Intercambiabili per reflex 24x36 Manualfocus Massimo Scotti, retrieved 6 April 2023^
- <ref name="Scheibel_1999_Kameratechnik"> 70 Jahre Minolta Kameratechnik - Von der Nifcalette [sic] bis zur Dynax 9 Verlag der H. Lindemanns Buchhandlung, 1999, retrieved 2012-10-16^