Nikkor lenses for medium format cameras

After the world war II, Nippon Kogaku (Nikon) turned from the war industory to comsumer products and mainly made many cameras. However, almost all cameras were 35mm film camera and no medium format camera was made except special fish-eye camera for scientific use.

Then, you may have a question: did not Nikon make lenses for medium format? Yes, they made. Some kind of medium format camera made by the other manufacturers came with lenses named Nikkor, and each camera has a legend of camera enthusiast who forced into adopting Nikkor lenses.

In this site, I will introduce each camera with its history.

From left to right: Airesflex Z (1951), Zenza Bronica EC-TL (1975), Zenza Bronica D (1959), Marshal press (1966) and Plaubel Makina 67 (1979). As shown above, most types of camera, as SLR, TLR, folding rangefinder and press type camera, are well covered with Nikkor lenses. Moreover, each camera has very unique mechanism except Airesflex which follows general TLR mechanism such as Rolleicord.

Introductions of each camera and its lens

Airesflex

Zenza Bronica and its interchangeable lenses

Marshal press

Plaubel Makina