Hanimar? Tomioki?

And anything on EBAY is suspect, anyway. I've seen Minolta lenses being sold as Nikon, Pentax being sold as Canon, etc.

It' s almost always ignorance, not malice.

But a few times it's worked out in my favor because the seller had exactly what I needed -- and listed it as something COMPLETELY different.

There are some unknown elements about these Hanimex lenses which could either lend some credence to the Tomioka claim or steer them farther away, and much depends on how much involvement there would have been between all the makers. Tomioka was in many ways a parallel to Zeiss in that they came up with an optical formula and design diagram for others, but left some or all of the manufacturing to their client/partner to do themselves, or farm it out to some other 3rd party. Even in those cases where the Tomioka brand is stamped on the face ring there's no qualifying terms, like "Made by" or "By" or "Assembled By" to truly know how deep the involvement runs when there's absolutely no denying Tomioka was a player. When it comes to how much involvement they had with Yashica, I think it's safe to say the lenses were 'made' by Tomioka in some form at least, and possibly assembled by Yashica at the very least for their part. That changes once they were acquired of course, and then everything is in house.

There's also the question of glass chemistry. Lots of lenses attributed to Tomioka in the M42 period have some distinctions that others don't, where they go beyond the simplest assumption that since the focal length was 55mm, it likely could have had some tie to Tomioka. (Not true, BTW)  Thorium was added as an enhancement to Tomioka's lenses (the majority of the faster 55's, including the 1.2's) and they're slightly radioactive. Of those radiated lenses, they usually came in 2 speeds where they were bound for 3rd party branding, as f/1.4, or f/1.8. Mamiya's certainly came that way, and the Auto Sears and Auto Rikenon 1.4's didn't come with radioactive slower siblings that I know of, although there was a Rikenon M42 Ato f/1.7 and an Auto Sears f/1.8 that had no Thorium content. Yashica's radiated lenses on the other hand, were always at f/1.4 and f/1.7 at the faster speeds (DS, DX, DS-M, and not including any 1.2's for limited comparison to rebranding). You'll notice there are no radiation listings under the Hanimex brand in the linked article.

I would speculate that the positive 0.1 speed difference was a marketing point meant to 'up-market' their own models and influence the buyer's favor towards Yashica -OR- there was an intentional and very real physical difference in how they were assembled (i.e., tolerances or fine tuning) to make the house brand incrementally better than those made for others. Another possibility might be that this idea would shield any speculators of the time, that they were even making lenses for rebranding, or simply selling parts for use in other maker's products.

As for any f/1.2 lenses, I've never seen one from Hanimex and don't know if they offered any. The 3rd party rebranded and Yashica AND Tomioka branded models were certainly known for who made what, and were all thoroughly (but minimally) radiated to make many a geiger counter click.

Last, but not least, is what parts have to be used to qualify any lens to be related to Tomioka in any way whatsoever. Barrels and screws and rubber, or metal bayonet mounts or iris blades would hardly count towards tieing the makers together at the prestige level some may want to claim. Chinon may have sold off their entire overstock of a previous years inventory of metal parts, so that anything assembled with non-Tomioka glass would appear to be exactly the same, when in fact, the optics are the distinguishing parts in my mind that would offer any reason to make a claim to fame. No Tomioka glass = NOT a 'Tomioka" lens, regardless of what other parts these may or may not contain.

Hi Randy,

...and don't forget the f2 versions too!