Originally posted by boriscleto That trademark was vacated at the end of WW II along with all other German patents and trademarks. Pentax = Pentaprism + Contax.
Except in South Africa, a traditional partner to Germany and the IIIrd Reich, which did not recognize immediately the termination of German IP rights after WW II, hence the "Asahi Pentar" there.
Originally posted by boriscleto (...)
The Contax trademark is owned by Kyocera who stopped using it in 2005.
The Contax brand is owned by Carl Zeiss AG and currently licensed to Kyocera but Carl Zeiss will get it back in 2015.
---------- Post added 02-09-2014 at 06:37 PM ----------
Originally posted by boriscleto And the Zenit 1 was just a Zorki rangefinder with a mirror and prism replacing the rangefinder. The Zorki being a Leica copy. It was released a year after the Asahiflex and 4 years before the Pentax.
True but the whole picture is even more complicated.
The thread mount of early Leica rangefinder cameras, called L39 of LTM (Leica Thread Mount), has a register (flange focal distance) of 28.8mm, a diameter of 39mm and a thread of 26 turns-per-inch (tpi) (approximately 0.977mm pitch) of Whitworth thread form. Indeed, in the 1930s Whitworth threads were the norm in microscope manufacture and Leitz was a major manufacturer of microscopes, so they had the tooling set up to produce the Whitworth thread form.
The thread mount of early FED (Soviet) rangefinder cameras had a register distance of 28.8mm and a diameter of 39mm but its thread was a 1mm DIN thread, hence the name M39x1. Later on, Soviet rangefinder camera makers adopted the 26tpi Whitworth thread too.
The early Zenit SLR cameras’ mount adopted the 39mm diameter of the Leica thread mount with a register of 45.2mm instead of 28.8mm to make room for the mirror box. Later on, they adopted the classical M42 mount.