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Mar 6, 2010

About the Auto Chinon Multi Coated lenses,which ones exactly or how to have a cheap quality prime lenses for a low price

If you read this may be you are Googling  the Auto Chinon lenses and you can not find any info exept in Japanese forums or 2-3 posts on the Pentaxforums.com . The information about this little performers is scarce on the  internet. To avoid any confusion i want to make the things clear that we are not talking here about the mediocre zoom labeled Auto Chinon available in various mounts made by brands like Vivitar, Cosina and so on.
We are talking about the beautiful primes mainly PK Pentax K mount but also M42 mount that can be found at Ebay quite cheaply and after testing many manual prime lenses i can say with a hand on my heart that together with the Russian Helios primes they are most value for money than any other, yes - any other lens.If we look in the Wikipedia we will see this under Chinon in the Pentax area:
  • Chinon 24mm f2.5
  • Chinon 28mm Auto Multi Coatedf2.8
  • Chinon 35-70mm f3.5-4.5 MC Macro (55mm filter)
  • Chinon 35-80mm f3.5-4.9 MC Macro
  • Chinon 45mm f2.8 Auto Multicoated
  • Chinon 50mm f1.4 Auto Multicoated
  • Chinon 50mm f1.7 Auto Multicoated Mac
  • Chinon 50mm f1.9 Auto Macro (53mm filter)
  • Chinon 135mm f2.8 Auto Multicoated
  • Chinon 200mm f3.5 Auto Multi Coated not on the list

  • Chinon Makinon 500mm f8 Catadioptric 
  • Chinon 28-50mm is not on the list - made by Cosina 
  • ???? some zooms are not listed but not worth talking about them, mediocre
  • if i find  not listed in the future will put them here
Apart from the last one - the mirror 500mm i have tested all of them and the ones marked in  orange are the one that are of interest to me. the ones in red i wish to find, very rare ones obviously.
 So,who made them? The razor sharp ones.  The thing is not very clear. Many say Tomioka, other say Leica made the famous 50mm f1.7 and f1.4 , we will speak about this later and any info will be appreciated.
I have in my possession perfect condition the  28mm 50mm/1.4 50mm/1.7  135mm 200mm all of them labeled Auto Chinon Multi Coated made in Japan and exactly with these colors the letters in the ring. All of them have 0 /zero/ mark on the aperture ring. I believe they are the supreme ones of all and s.th. like limited series produced for a very short time. I tend to believe that they are Leica made by special order fom Chinon for a short period of time. May be Tomioka, but at the end who cares, its the performance we are after, not the brand, or i would stick with Canon in that case. So i will try an objective review and comparison of each of that lenses. and most importantly-full size samples. Every one separately and comparing to many of the primes that i have or have passed for a short period in my hands. Also some of these lenses exist under under names -Sears, Revuenon, Makinon... and in other mounts.

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