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The Kalimar 135mm f/2.8 MC Automatic KR is a manual-focus telephoto prime lens built for Pentax K-mount cameras, part of the wave of affordable third-party lenses widely sold through camera shops and mail-order catalogs in the 1970s and 80s. Like many lenses branded under the Kalimar name, it was produced for Kalimar by an outside optical manufacturer and marketed as a budget-friendly alternative to first-party telephoto primes of the era.
The lens offers a 135mm focal length with a maximum aperture of f/2.8, a moderately fast telephoto specification useful for portraits, candid shooting, and subjects at a distance where a standard lens can’t get close enough. The “MC” designation indicates multi-coated optics, a coating approach adopted industry-wide by this point to reduce flare and ghosting and improve contrast and color transmission compared to older single-coated lens designs. The “KR” and “Automatic” designations indicate the lens is built for Pentax’s K-mount with full aperture automation, meaning the diaphragm stays wide open for focusing and viewing and stops down automatically at the moment of exposure, matching the metering behavior of native Pentax K-mount lenses of the period.
As a fully manual lens, focusing and aperture selection are both controlled directly on the lens barrel, with no autofocus or electronic communication with the camera body, consistent with the manual K-mount SLRs it was designed to pair with. Build quality reflects typical third-party construction standards of the era, generally an all-metal barrel with a manual focus ring and click-stop aperture ring.
Because Kalimar-branded lenses were often manufactured by different OEM partners across the brand’s history, specific details like optical construction, minimum focusing distance, and filter size can vary between production runs, so photographers evaluating a specific example should confirm these details directly against the lens in hand.
Key Features
– 135mm f/2.8 telephoto prime lens
– Pentax K-mount (KR) with full aperture automation
– Multi-coated (MC) optics
– Fully manual focus and aperture control
– All-metal manual lens construction typical of the era
