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When is a Carl Zeiss lens NOT a Carl Zeiss lens?


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I shoot Exaktas quite a bit, and being able to use most of my Exakta-mount lenses with my Canon gear (Bellows+TTL Flash!) is merely an added bonus.<p>

 

There's certainly wide sample variation, especially after 30-60 years since date of manufacture. That being said, the better pieces in my collection of CZJ (and Isco, Shacht, Angenieu, Schneider, etc) lenses are outstanding. The contrast, color, acutence, it's all there.

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Frankly, I don't see how lenses that were farmed out to Yashica are somehow "more authentic" than those from Jena.

<p>

Oh, and find me a modern SLR lens that can touch the bokeh of a lens with a 20-blade preset diaphragm. ;)

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  • 2 weeks later...
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  • 6 months later...
I think the guy who started the conversation is not a photographer but an anticommunist who has never touched a zeiss jena or a pentacon or a jupiter lens or an Helios 40 85mm f/1.5 in his life. I have for example many many lenses from jena including the ikoflex I 1938 model with the tessar. All of these lenses are comparable to the leitz summitar f/2.0 for which I paid more money than all my russian and east german lenses. I cannot tell the difference in A4 size between the summitar and the jupiter 3 and jupiter 8 in my zorki. These guys are just the guys who learned photography from the internet and they have never touched a real lens like the Helios 40 f/1.5 85mm (Weight more than 1kg) to see what the russians and the east germans achieved in optics. The problem with the russian and east german equipment is the bodies not the lenses but if you get a good body it will last for 3 centuries. It was imposible a country with space research not to have good optics. The soviet satelites could read the plates of the cars in the time square and their good optics were copies of the carl zeiss jena lenses including the famous zeiss telescopes and binoculars.
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Hi,

 

"I think the guy who started the conversation is not a photographer"

 

I have been taking photos since the age of 10 and am a fully trained pro advertising photographer.

 

"but an anticommunist"

 

...I love vodka and snow.

 

"who has never touched a zeiss jena or a pentacon..."

 

I have touched all of them and used some also...hence my comments.

 

"These guys are just the guys who learned photography from the internet"

 

I am fully trained at full time photographic college, taught by jobbing professionals.

 

" Helios 40 f/1.5 85mm (Weight more than 1kg)"

 

Heavy and solid does not automatically mean well made or a quality item, far from it, many Russian made items are very poorly made, this is a fact.

 

"It was imposible a country with space research not to have good optics"

 

...the leader in space is the USA...when did you last see a top quality american designed and made lens? ...and did NASA use Russian lenses...no they used West German...

 

cheers.

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NASA probably could not legally work with an eastern bloc company to make a space qualifed CUSTOM lens; ie one that is built with special greases and lubes that dont outgass in a vacuum. Thus your point about NASA not using eastern bloc optics is flawed; almost racist. The birthplace modern Optics is Jena; the home of Zeiss for along time. Many very fne lenses have been made by Zeiss; even ones made in the old eastern bloc. The 1950's Tessar I once used on an Exakta VX was an outstanding eastern bloc lens. What is with all the hatred and bias? Quality control was worse in eastern bloc items; damning them all to hell is abit odd.
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  • 1 year later...

<p>I don't agree with the often repeated oppinion that Carl Zeiss Jena lenses were generally pre war projects. Flektogon lenses were all retrofocus wide angle optics which obviously didn't have anything common with pre war lenses. Indeed, the flektogons were much more innovative projects than the west-distagon lenses in 50s and 60s, like the 20/4 and 25/4 flektogons which were introduced when the only distagon existed was the 35/4 lens for Contarex! Also, the first Gauss type lens for rolleiflex was the east german CZJ Biometar 80/2,8, first designed in 1951, before the appearance of Planars. Indeed, the Schneider Xenotar 80/2,8 lens, later used by rolleiflex, seems to be a copy of this biometar lens! Even the Tessar formula was redesigned by CZJ thereupon the end of WWII, many years before the company in Oberkochen decided to redesign its tessar lenses! The last black CZJ lenses for Praktica and Pentacon six cameras, were modern designs and very good performers equal to the Carl Zeiss lenses for Contax/Yashica mount (especially in terms of the rendition of shape outlines and surface-depth details, I have never compared their sharpness in big enlargements and their scanning copies in pc monitor).<br>

Of course the build quality of the west Carl Zeiss lenses were much better. Especially the line of the lenses for the Contarex mount were made with the minimal mechanical tolerances that could get achieved. This fact combined with the the optical excellence of these lenses led to the best (and of course the most expensive) line of lenses ever produced. (I have never experienced the performance of leica lenses).</p>

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  • 8 years later...
"Just for the record..these M42 screw Carl Zeiss 'jena' lenses were made in Eastern Germany (DDR) run by the Russians after the end of world war two and up until the fall of the Berlin wall."

 

Of course this is (almost) nonsense. The Zeiss plant in Jena was run by the Russians for a short time after WWII only, then it was state-owned by the GDR.

 

And the lenses manufactured there were so bad that some of them were listed in the "proper" (west-german) Zeiss catalogues as lenses for the west-german made Contax models. They were so bad that Rollei decided to equip some batches of their Rolleiflex with the east-german made Tessar in the early 50s. And ask some owners of those cameras what they think of the west-german made Tessars of the same eras (there are some lemon lenses among them). The coating process developed by Carl Zeiss Jena was so bad that one leading company for coating optical surfaces (Balzer) based their success on licenses from Carl Zeiss Jena. Actually, I never had any problems with cleaning east-german lenses even when they had severe fungus - contrary to some western lenses I never managed to damage the coating which came out pristine even after cleaning with concentrated vinegar.

 

Actually, Zeiss-Jena improved most of the old optical designs and introduced some new ones (Zeiss-Jena was the first or second manufacturer making wide-angle lenses with a retrofocus design...at a time when noone in West-Germany was even thinking of desinging such a lens). I have several cameras equipped with east-german Tessars (which were redesigned in 1948 - in West-Germany they followed the pre-WWII formula some years longer) and these are definitively prime lenses. I know a photo technician who once put a ground glass on his east-german Tessara equipped Ercona (= 6x9 Ikonta) camera. He told me he had virtually to rub his eyes, since he had never seen such a sharp image on a 6x9 ground glass. This guy had visited a technicians college for photography for some years and does large-format himself, I think you might trust him.

 

And some other trivia about the east-german Zeiss lenses "made by the russians for the low-end market": these were the first ones with a ball-bearing aperture mechanism, and (as far as I know) the only ones with automatic aperture correction for close-up distances on tele lenses (as you might know, the actual f-stop also depends on the displacement of the lens barrel which should not be neglected when focussing close-up with tele lenses).

 

"The proper Carl Zeiss company in Western Germany was furious that the Russians were making lenses with the Zeiss name on them and pursued a legal case for years, but this was very difficult across the west/east divide and the russians got around the issue by putting Carl Zeiss 'JENA' on their lenses."

 

This is a VERY abrigded version of the legal issues between Carl Zeiss (West Germany) and Carl Zeiss Jena. Besides that it is NOT true that the "russians" made Zeiss lenses (see above), actually Carl Zeiss Jena lost this lawsuit in some countries and won it in some others. So they had to re-label their lenses for export to certain countries, including West-Germany.

 

I hardly can believe that this posting is based on personal experiences, and on personal research since there are so many faults in it which comply with anti-eastern block propaganda. You NEVER can damn all products coming from a certain country or nation and "threw them into the self pot" as we say in Germany. Doing so shows more about the prejudices of the author than about reality.

 

The russian lenses based on pre-war Zeiss designs are a completely different story. In many cases they also used the old mechanical (barrel) design, and their optical quality seems to be doubtful in more cases than with east-german made lenses. I always wonder how come that so many "Sonnar" lenses with LTM mount (these do exist but are pretty rare) are sold by ebay-sellers from eastern Europe...

Well, we know that. That's enough for me. If the others are dumb or ignorant enough to buy it for real Zeiss lenses then let it be. 99% will never notice it anyway.

<p>I don't agree with the often repeated oppinion that Carl Zeiss Jena lenses were generally pre war projects. Flektogon lenses were all retrofocus wide angle optics which obviously didn't have anything common with pre war lenses. Indeed, the flektogons were much more innovative projects than the west-distagon lenses in 50s and 60s, like the 20/4 and 25/4 flektogons which were introduced when the only distagon existed was the 35/4 lens for Contarex! Also, the first Gauss type lens for rolleiflex was the east german CZJ Biometar 80/2,8, first designed in 1951, before the appearance of Planars. Indeed, the Schneider Xenotar 80/2,8 lens, later used by rolleiflex, seems to be a copy of this biometar lens! Even the Tessar formula was redesigned by CZJ thereupon the end of WWII, many years before the company in Oberkochen decided to redesign its tessar lenses! The last black CZJ lenses for Praktica and Pentacon six cameras, were modern designs and very good performers equal to the Carl Zeiss lenses for Contax/Yashica mount (especially in terms of the rendition of shape outlines and surface-depth details, I have never compared their sharpness in big enlargements and their scanning copies in pc monitor).<br>

Of course the build quality of the west Carl Zeiss lenses were much better. Especially the line of the lenses for the Contarex mount were made with the minimal mechanical tolerances that could get achieved. This fact combined with the the optical excellence of these lenses led to the best (and of course the most expensive) line of lenses ever produced. (I have never experienced the performance of leica lenses).</p>

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hi all, war and politics - the entire contax camera factory was moved to kien, ukraine by the russians, at some point.

I have no knowledge of lenses being made in kiev. obviously viewfinder/rangefinder optics built there. later, the Kiev cameras were produced, contax designs.

 

after the ravages of WWII, soviet oppression, it is amazing that the workers at Jena, produced anything- material shortages, the need to prioritize the s.union market - due to russian priorities, when they needed to earn hard currency from sales to the more prosperous west. I remember looking at photo mags in the 60's seeing the ultra-wide 20mm flektagon avertised, I think for the Exakta, still being produced in DresdenI wonder if anyone has a7'd one of these?

due to Comecon (the S.U's common market), I guess much of the output from Kiev and Jena, went to markets in the soviet orbit. poor old Meoptam in CZ(THE COUNTRY), had the same situation. they all survived, because they had to, to live.

 

so quality-control is likely to have suffered. however at the time, they re obviously not in the same market sector as the contarex/contaflex cameras, from the west. 50-60 years later, we are all expect top QC.

 

we have the luxury and time to experiment with such equipment. prewar and post war, ziess were about 20 years ahead of anybody else, in lens design, including leica. who caught up somewhat, when CAD became available in the70's.remember most early leica lenses were based on ziess formulae, elmar - tessar, summicron - planar,sonnar, biogon, distagon - elmarits.- imaging progress owes a lot to ziess. their designs helped to rebuildjapan's ecomy, of course.

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  • 1 year later...

decided to register to this site after bumping into great valuable information and knowledge, thanks to all you guys I've been learning a lot.

 

Any input on this next question will be deeply appreciated. I'm about to buy my first "real" lens (on a budget) for a digital cinema camera and I'm looking for a lens that can deliver an organic-dramatic feel, so after heavy research I narrowed my options into two lenses (I know there are a lot of other good lenses out there but I'm totally conviced that these two are my final options) :

 

Option A. Zeiss Flektogon 20mm F2.8 (serial 1001xxxx)

 

Option B. Zeiss Contax Distagon 25mm F2.8. (serial 581xxxx)

 

 

I've read a lot about how quality control is greater on the Contax Line but at the same time I've read about some Jena's having great quality too. Cost of both is relatively similar on the web.

 

 

My priorities in this decission are: image quality, color rendering and of course, durability of the lens. I am not too worried about corner/edges softness because (I'm currently sitting on a 1.6x crop factor so I won't be dealing with the real corners)

 

Thanks a lot for your time.

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the question is similar to whether the beer with the hijacked name Budweiser. The beer made in the Us does not conform to the <germn purity laws, So an urquell in Eurrope is something else than abroad. Trade mark disputes h\keeps the markets separate..

 

So it was with Zeiss.western exports, sometimesThey had just jena and T for tessar and S for sonnar. on the front rings. same contruction as pre war.. Pancolars were recalculated. Quality issues centers on the grease used on the helix often quite stiff. some oils spilt over on the aparture blades, making them stick.. Some later zeiss west for the ZIV Icarex were produced by the zeiss-Voigtländer factory in Braunsshweig, but also marked Carl Zeiss. The C\Y mount zeiss for the Contax were produced by Kyocera in Japan, Yashica was taken over by them. No systematic defects seem to occcur..

 

 

p.

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