I usually talk about rare, optically outstanding, or historically significant lenses here, but today we\u2019ll talk about a lens which \u2014 while being two of the three \u2014 is commonly referred to as the worst zoom lens in history.<\/p>\n
When Higuchi Tagashi calculated the \u201cyon-san-hachi-roku\u201d in 1961, his focus wasn\u2019t on beating Frank Back\u2019s Zoomar but opening up a new field: an affordable midrange zoom with a previously unheard-of mechanical design.<\/p>\n
Nikon would sell over 160,000 of them from February 1963 to November 1975 \u2014 more than 10 times the volume the Zoomar sold. The lens was terrible by any optical measure. But it democratised the zoom concept and proved there was a mass market for variable focal length lenses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I usually talk about rare, optically outstanding, or historically significant lenses here, but today we\u2019ll talk about a lens which \u2014 while being two of the three \u2014 is commonly referred to as the worst zoom lens in history. When Higuchi Tagashi calculated the \u201cyon-san-hachi-roku\u201d in 1961, his focus wasn\u2019t on beating Frank Back\u2019s Zoomar […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[40,42,41,38,20,39,43],"class_list":["post-18","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lens-history","tag-43-86mm","tag-frank-back","tag-higuchi-tagashi","tag-nikon","tag-vintage-lenses","tag-zoom-lens","tag-zoomar"],"yoast_head":"\n