The first lens to carry the Rokkor designation was a 200mm 4.5 lens that came with the hand-holdable
aerial camera Chiyoda SK-100 in 1940. After the Rokkor name was dropped and no longer engraved in new lenses after 1980/1981, the Rokkor name resurfaced two times. As was revealed not before 2006, the Rokkor name was still used internally for prototypes of a never released
SR-mount Minolta MD Apo Tele Rokkor 300mm 2.8 manual-focus lens in the early 1980s, a lens design, which later saw life as the
A-mount Minolta AF Apo Tele 300mm 2.8 G in 1985, a non-Rokkor auto-focus lens. The Rokkor name was also resurrected for a short time between 1996 and 1998 for the Minolta G-Rokkor 28mm 3.5 lens. As the only officially released auto-focus Rokkor ever, this lens was incorporated into the
Minolta TC-1 135 film compact camera. To celebrate Minolta's 70th anniversary in 1998, the same optics were also used in the
Minolta TC-1 Limited as well as in a
Leica thread-mount version of the lens in a limited production run of 2000 units for the Japanese market only. When the brand was still used by Minolta, there were also printed Minolta magazines named "ROKKOR" in Austria and Japan. The brand was so well respected among photographers that some customers asked for "Rokkor cameras" and questioned the origin of the lenses when the first Minolta lenses without the Rokkor designation hit the market between 1977 and 1980. Many continued to call at least the manual-focus
Minolta SR-mount lenses "Rokkors" long after the name was dropped. Even decades later, when
Sony took over the
A-mount auto-focus SLR system from
Konica Minolta in 2006, for which no Rokkor lenses were ever produced, there were (unsuccessful) petitions to reintroduce the old Rokkor brand. There are now even totally unrelated pseudo-brands named
Rokunar and
Rokinon trying to capitalize on the power of Minolta's brand. For some while in the 1960s and 1970s SR-mount SLR lenses manufactured for the North American market were engraved with
Rokkor-X rather than just
Rokkor (as was used in the rest of the world) in order to improve trackability and dry out the gray market. Although some buyers from the US and Europe each associated either the Rokkor-X or the non-X-ed Rokkor designation with a higher quality, respectively, both types of lenses were built to exactly the same specifications and quality standards in the factory. They differed only in their name plate. In the 1980s and 1990s, Minolta used a similar scheme for A-mount lenses, which were labelled
Maxxum AF in the US and Canada (where the A-mount camera bodies were labelled
Maxxum) and just
AF elsewhere (including in those regions otherwise using the
Dynax and
α labels for the cameras). Until around 1975, the Rokkor (or Rokkor-X) name was followed by a two-letter combination indicating the optical formula of the lens. The first letter stood for the number of groups, while the second letter indicated the number of elements; for example, a Rokkor-QF was a six element lens with four groups. == Specialist types of Rokkor lenses ==