Okaya

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Okaya Kōgaku Kikai K.K. (岡谷光学機械㈱, meaning Okaya Optical Works Company, Ltd.) was a Japanese maker of leaf-shutter 35mm cameras (as well as "Vista" brand binoculars) in the 1950s. Okaya was based in Nagano. Okaya's cameras were distributed within Japan by Hattori Tokei-ten. Their brand name was Lord — a name that was probably owned by Hattori and was already used in 1937–8 by Tōkyō Kōgaku.[1]

Lord cameras have Okaya Highkor lenses. The earliest Lord 35 is a viewfinder camera; all subsequent Lord cameras have rangefinders. The last models have exposure meters.

Okaya's technical innovations (at least for Japanese cameras) included a rewind button that only needed to be depressed at the start rather than all the way through the film (Lord 35, 1953), a folding rewind crank (Lord IVB, 1955), a baseplate port for a mechanical winder (Lord SE, 1958) and photocells around the front of the lens and thus under any filter (Lord Martian, 1960).[2]

(Okaya should not be confused with Okada.)


Models

Notes

  1. Tōkyō Kōgaku was a dependent company of Hattori at the time.
  2. The Japanese Historical Camera, 2nd ed. (Tokyo: JCII Camera Museum, 2004), pp.68, 81, and 103 respectively.

Sources and further reading

Links

In Japanese: