Minolta Super Rokkor 45mm f/2.8 (LTM)

It rides in a jacket pocket, apart from the camera, wearing the generic 34mm snap-on cap that Martin Bluhm recommends for it. Pull it out and the weight catches you off guard: about 160 g in a brass barrel roughly 31mm long, although the Minolta 35 Model II manual puts it at 150 g. The focus ring looks like a gear. Chiyoko is the name engraved on it, short for Chiyoda Kogaku, the company that built Minolta cameras in those years.

This is the lens the Minolta 35 launched with in 1947, and Chiyoda went on making it in six production series until about 1955. The earliest bodies exposed a 24x32mm frame, and on that short format 45mm framed about like a fifty does on standard 35mm. On a full 24x36 negative it sits a touch wide of normal. Inside are five elements in three groups and eight aperture blades. Early copies carry a small round window in the front bezel that shows the set aperture; later series dropped it.

Bluhm, who shoots his copy on a Leica IIIc, calls it very sharp with good contrast, and he finds the camera's built-in 50mm finder perfectly usable for composing. A tripod test on a Sony A7 II was less kind to the zone between center and edge. It found an excellent center and good corners with a weaker band in between, a trait the tester says to keep in mind at every aperture up to f/8, along with noticeably heavy vignetting. Coma and chromatic aberration were close to absent and distortion stayed low. That soft ring also helps out-of-focus backgrounds swirl, which behind a portrait subject against foliage can look entirely deliberate. The tester's own verdict: an art tool on modern digital bodies, not an everyday standard.

Handling takes some getting used to. The aperture ring sits at the front and runs from f/2.8 to f/16 without a single click, so any in-between stop is yours, but moving it tends to drag the focus ring along, and near five feet the aperture figures get hard to read. Recheck focus after every aperture change. The tube, at least, is fixed, with nothing to pull out and lock before the first frame.

Next to a collapsible 5cm f/3.5 of the period, it is two-thirds of a stop faster and needs no extending. Collector interest shows in the price. Bluhm paid $160 for his in November 2019 but saw others priced at $300 to $400 in early 2020, and he notes they do not come up online often. As a 39mm thread lens it fits any LTM body and adapts to Leica M and mirrorless cameras.

Bluhm also points out that the 34mm front thread is an uncommon size, and filters to fit it take more hunting. If you track down a 34mm yellow or orange for black-and-white film, enter it in Zone Light Meter so the filter factor is folded into the reading instead of being added in your head on a street corner. Screwed onto a Leica IIIc and framed through that 50mm finder, the way Bluhm uses his, it looks as if it had always belonged there.