Richard Haw's Classic Nikon Repair and Review

Hello, everybody! Do you remember Sony’s tagline back in the day? If “It’s a Sony” doesn’t sound familiar to you then you must be younger than 35. It’s effective branding, it’s catchy and easy-to-mention. It’s an effective way to drill into your potential customers’ minds about your brand’s image and what that stands for. You’ll have to keep it short, simple and direct. Just repeat it like a jingle and it’s certainly going to stick to their head the next time they buy an electronic device. I will play on that slogan today but this time it’s not a Sony but “It’s a Sonnar“, a Tele-Sonnar to be precise if I’m not mistaken.

Introduction:

The Cine-Nikkor 75mm f/2 was made from an unknown date, nobody knew when it ended production. I suspect it was made from the mid-1960s up until around the 1970s. I was told that Nikon does not really document anything that’s not a consumer product so precise information about these can be scarce and inaccurate. These are specialty lenses so I guess they were made in low-volume which are spread across a long production time. This lens is the second-longest in the Cine-Nikkor portfolio for the C-mount, it filled the gap between 50mm and 100mm. It’s rather useful for wildlife, sports, news or just about anything that requires a bit more reach. You could think of it as the 200/3.5 equivalent for a standard 16mm camera as it gives the same field-of-view and depth-of-field characteristics of a 200/3.5 lens for 35mm. Crop-factor is a recent concept that’s not really relevant in the context of shooting movies but since we are interested in using this for stills you should always be aware of this.

Despite its focal length and speed it managed to remain quite compact, this isn’t larger-nor-thinner than the other ones except for the early version of the Cine-Nikkor 25mm f/1.4 which is an oddity. Keeping the size of the barrel uniform is essential so you could use your custom-made attachments. Its mount could be repositioned by depressing the thread and rotating it, allowing you to view the scales no matter which orientation it ended up in the camera. This is a nice touch, I am not aware of any other manufacturer that did this.