De pe Fred Miranda, despre frumuseţea mea de 135mm f2.8:
Vivitar didn’t make any of the lenses they branded. They were all made by other companies, even the ones where the design was commissioned by Vivitar. They did very conveniently code each lens to identify the actual manufacturer and assigned the first two digits of the serial number to that code. This is the known list:
- 06 – Olympus
- 09 – Cosina
- 13 – Schneider Optik
- 22 – Kiron (Kino Precision)
- 25 – Ozone Optical
- 28 – Komine
- 32 – Makinon
- 33 – Asanuma
- 37 – Tokina
- 42 – Bauer
- 44 – Perkin Elmer (US)
- 47 – Chinon
- 51 – Tokyo Trading
- 56 – Kyoe Schoji
- 75 – Hoya Optical
- 81 – Polar
There are a few others that have not been documented, 77 is one of those. I believe 77 is Cosina as well. So again, this is the easy part. The more difficult part is picking out the gems from the hundred plus lenses Vivitar branded. Kiron is the first brand people think of when gems come to mind, with lenses like the 24/2.0 and the 105/2.8 macro, which was also sold under their own brand as as Lester Dine. Tokina’s major contribution is the 90/2.5 macro, the famous ‘Bokina’, as well as many other fine primes like the 17/3.5, and the amazing 35-105/3.5 vari-focal macro-zoom. But to me, the real standout is actually Komine, with lenses like the 200/3.0 (really a 2.8) and the 135/2.3 (again a 2.0) and some fine macro lenses like the 55/2.8 (1:1), 90/2.8 (1:1) and 135/2.8 (1:2).
Btw, to confuse things even further, other brands picked up Vivitar’s idea and started to sell some of the same lenses under their name. So you can now find an Elicar, Panagor, or Spiratone lens that has a Vivitar twin and possibly the OEM version on top of that. Anyway, here I go again.. This gives you a decent overview, even though it’s only scratching the surface. If you really want to get into it try to find publications by Robert Monaghan. He did more research on the subject that anyone else. His semi abandoned website is at this link: http://medfmt.8k.com/third/index.html