As with all of the wonderful things we offer, we try to include as much of their history as we can discover. We have run into a roadblock on researching the history of the Kinoptik lenses we recently added to our website. We have found very little information about the company itself, its founders, and the products that they made, and even less information in English. Understandably, there are a few articles we have come across in French, but unfortunately neither of us speaks French. What we have found so far is that Kinoptik was founded in France in 1932 by Georges Grosset and Georges Perthuis. An interesting Japanese website we came across, https://bit.ly/3nC3gnv has a brief article about the history of Kinoptik, but it was not sourced. In the article, they say that the 2 Georges worked at a French optical company called Optis around the same time that Pierre Angenieux was working there. We haven’t been able to find any information about Optis either, nor verify this information with another source. The article goes on to say that Kinoptik began making lenses for the military in 1939, before the factory was destroyed by German bombs during the invasion. During the occupation, the company was forced to manufacture products for Askania. After the war, the engineers at Kinoptik returned their attention to the manufacture of their own 35mm cine lenses. The Apochromat series came to encompass 35mm, 16mm and television lenses and seems to have been their main line of lenses from the 1950s through the 1980s.
We also have a Kinoptik Erax lens on our site, but haven’t found any mention of this series in English. I am including an image of the 1st page of an article from La Cinematographie Francaise from June 1950 which discusses the Kinoptik Erax. These lenses were distributed in the US by Victor Kayfetz and by Karl Heitz, both out of New York. In 1981, Georges Grosset’s son Roger sold Kinoptik to the SFIM Group, who we also have not been able to identify. The company seems to have gone out of business in 2003. So I leave you with this question: Do you know anything about Kinoptik, the history of the company, or the Apochromat lenses they produced? We would love to hear from you!
