The company was set up as a U.S. subsidiary of Kino Precision Industries Limited, Tokyo, Japan in 1978–79, in order to market manually-focused film camera optical lenses to the United States. Kino Precision was originally formed by a group of engineers formerly employed at Nikon, who had developed their own designs for 35mm (24x36cm) film format camera lenses. These lenses were offered in a variety of camera mounts to fit a number of different Japanese cameras, including Canon, Contax, Konica, Minolta, Nikon, Olympus, and Pentax.
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