While most optical firms in the 1950s (including Nippon Kogaku) opted for big, bulky lenses to fill out their longer focal lengths, the German firm of Novoflex went a different route. They marketed slow but light-weight optics mounted on fast-focusing grips that allowed easy hand-holding. These proved particularly popular for covering sports events and photographing wildlife. The series went through several changes in focal lengths and mountings, but the earliest series included a 300mm lens head that allowed infinity focus on their reflex housing for the Contax (and Nikon RF) cameras. Here is such a rig, lacking only a Nikon-specific “bridge” to make it the fastest and best-designed reflex housing unit that would ever work on a Nikon rangefinder camera. I intend to get such a bridge made.
The Novoflex reflex housing is particularly nice with a rotating finder, bright, but plain ground glass and a convenient quick reset for the mirror. The front mount is Leica thread but the housing is deeper than the Visoflex I, which limits its use of Nikkor and other non-Noflexar optics.
Novoflex also made a popular series of bellows for various makes of cameras. This is their reflex housing-specific bellows with a Schneider 135mm Xenon in barrel-mount that allows infinity focus similar to NK’s 135mm f4 Nikkor.
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