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

Hi,

 

Q: When is a 'Carl Zeiss' lens not a 'Carl Zeiss' lens?

 

A: When it is a Carl Zeiss 'JENA' lens....

 

I am posting this because as a Contax/Zeiss user, I am concerned that an

increasing number of people are potentially getting misled into thinking that

the old M42 screw mount Carl Zeiss 'Jena' lenses are proper Zeiss lenses, when

in fact they are nothing of the sort.

 

In particular there has been a mushroom effect in people using older lenses

with adaptors on digital SLR's and sellers on a certain auction site are most

certainly IMO trying to con bidders into thinking these old M42 Zeiss 'Jena'

lenses are the real thing...in other words misleading bidders into thinking

they are the equivalent of the 'proper' Contax Zeiss lenses.

 

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. The only real connection to Carl Zeiss is

that they were made in the old Zeiss factory in Jena, which was 'inherited' by

the Russians. It was just quite literally four walls and a roof.

 

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.

 

These 'Jena' lenses were mostly made for the low end Praktica cameras and are

of generally low end quality with poor build and design. Some of the lenses

have proven to be of good optical design, but these are very much in the

minority and all the lenses suffer from poor build issues and poor longevity.

 

You can get good results with some of the lenses, but should be aware that they

are nothing like the same build quality as proper Zeiss lenses.

 

I am stunned at how much some of the M42 Jena lenses are now fetching, indeed

some buyers are now paying almost as much as you would for proper Contax Zeiss

lenses! which does lead me to think they are imagining they are actually buying

the real thing, when they are not.....

 

cheers Steve.

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.

Arh, Zeiss.

I avoid Zeiss because the history of Zeiss is very complicated. Zeiss have too many branches that I don't know which one is make camera or optics.

However, I do trust the quality of Zeiss Jena in pre-war state. But I don't know very much about Opton.

Y'know, Steve, CZJ in the DDR made many fine lenses. And Zeiss Oberkochen in the BRD made lenses in M42 for, e.g., the Icarex TM.

 

I don't know what you intended, but you've added more misinformation to the mountains of it already here on photo.net and elsewhere on the Web.

There are great and so so Zeiss lenses produced behind the old iron curtain. A blanket damnation of all of them is abit full of bulldung. Jena is the birthplace of a hell of alot of optical designs. In process camera lenses, movie lenses and microscope lenses and some still camera lenses the eastern blocs offerings were often great; often with a radically greater varability in quality control; often priced WAY lower in cost than the West's lenses. If the eastern blocs lenses were not proper Zeiss lenses; were the east Germans really not really Germans? Lenses have been made in Jena for over 100 years. The Optical museum in Jena has optical instruments from eight centuries. There are lenses made with pride in the old eastern bloc; made by Zeiss; real Germans with a super long history of making optics.

During the cold war period CZJ were a good source of lenses with a better than average quality / price ratio than usual. They also had a decent build quality but lacked the luxury feel of western product.

If its sharp and it works who really cares for the normal folks , but if your a collecter then you all ready know this stuff, and you do not well ,thats a your problem:

Without doubt I agree with Kelly 100%. The East German Zeiss lenses were initially made by the same workers that made pre-war Zeiss lenses. Admittedly they may not have had the same standard of quality control in the East, so there are going to be a few more 'duds', but generally, if it looks like a Zeiss, says it is a Zeiss and makes photographs like a Zeiss, then it's probably a Zeiss.

 

There is also very little difference (if any) between the Pentacon F range of cameras and the Contax S range. They look the same they feel the same and they make photographs of similar quality. Again it's mostly a matter of quality control, so there may be more Pentacon duds out there than Contax duds, but one could buy several Pentacon F cameras for the price of one Contax S cameras and the chances are (as with the lenses) that you will find the first one perfectly satifactory, if not you can easily buy another and another again before you will even come close to the price of a Contax S, or a West German Zeiss lens. Therefore I would say, take a chance, your in grave danger of buying an East German winner!

 

I think that Steve is in terrific danger of missing a heap full of bargains.

The Carl Zeiss was born in Jena, eastern Germany, in twenty years of the XX century, by merge of a series of pre existing factories (IKA, Goertz, Contessa Nettel and many others). After the III Reich fall, in 28 June 1945, few hundreds of Carl Zeiss Jena techinicians, engineers and specialized workings, plus their families, escaped from the soviet controlled zone towards the american controlled zone. They estabilished the western Carl Zeiss in Oberchocken, near Stuttgart, while the technicians and engineers who remained in Jena continued to work in the Carl Zeiss Jena, in the same pre war factories. The two parent firms was both existing since 1961, when a court of justice recognized the right to use the Carl Zeiss trade mark only at the Carl Zeiss Stuttgart. From 1961 to late '90 the Carl Zeiss Jena lenses was named CZJ or Aus Jena for the western markets.

The lenses made in Carl Zeiss Jena from 1945 to the end of the production (late '90) are true pre war Carl Zeiss optical projects. Not too modern and perfomer as the western Zeiss lenses, but very good also.

Ciao.

This post seems to contain more politics than optics. Carl Zeiss Jena made lenses for the West German Contaxes in the early years before the political situation became too tense for them to continue cooperation, and some of the lenses CZJ made for the Pentacon Six cameras are exceptionally good, including the 80 and 120mm Biometars (the 80mm is very similar to the West German Planar) and the 180 and 30mm Sonnars.

 

I very strongly suspect that the current prices of CZJ lenses are based primarily on their merits. The ones that I have (35mm Flektagon, several 58mm Biotars, 50mm Flektagon, 80mm Biometar, 180mm Sonnar, perhaps a couple of others) are all very good lenses and certainly well worth what I paid for them.

Drifting off the original topic a little, to the Contax S and Pentacon F mentioned above: The Contax S was begun before WWII when there was no dispute over who was the "real" Carl Zeiss or Zeiss-Ikon, and completed in Dresden in 1948. They were made interchangeaby (after the original "S" model) in Contax and Pentacon nameplates depending on the legal restrictions in the destination country.

 

I have a fair amount of experience with these cameras, and the Pentacon F is a better camera than the Contax S in every detail in which they differ. It is smoother, quieter, easier to wind and has a brighter focusing screen than the original, plus its introduction of internally coupled auto-diaphragm lenses.... all design changes made subsequent to the Contax's introduction were improvements. It was not a great commercial success, but there was a lot of competition at that time.... and, significantly, they were faced with huge obstacles of political propaganda of a tone very similar to the original post in this thread, which made sale in the largest markets such as the USA a virtual impossibility.

Well, interesting though that the " PROPER " Zeiss recognize Carl Zeiss Jena ( as that in East Germany ) part of Zeiss History and a side track of Zeiss Lens production as they speak it out in an issue of Zeiss Historica ( don't quite remember which issue, but its some time after the east/west merging )

 

So while I would agree that the CZJ lens was not West German Zeiss but I would not go about and say those are not Zeiss lens, its an interesting piece of History.

 

In fact if we take this, then many of the Contax/Zeiss lens is not Zeiss then despite having top notch performance ( almost all of the G series lens and N series lens say for example .... ). By that account we might exclude all of todays Zeiss lens ( for still photography in 35mm format ) on current catalog ( meaning those ZS/ZF/ZK/ZM/ZA range )

My experience of Jena lenses is that they are extremely good. Just one example of Jena's ability to make the most of its heritage, is the 180mm Sonnar for the Pentacon Six / Praktica range; in its day an almost unique lens that is exceptional on both 6x6 and 35mm formats. It also seems gratuitous to insult the Jena workforce who were, so far as I can make out from articles in magazines of the period, entirely German, not Russian. The original posting strikes me as something of a troll, to be honest.<div></div>

My 80mm CZJ Biometar is as good as my CZ Hasselblad lens from the same period. What a silly post! Perhaps the list has informed the opinion of the poster.

actually, at the very end of the DDR CZJ era in the 1980s, the East German firm did sub-contract to put the "Zeiss" name on some rebranded Japanese lenses, (probably made by one of the many companies of that era which supplied Vivitar and the like) for Nikon, Pentax K, and other mounts. I have seen a 28mm f/2.8 of this style and probably other fical lengths and designs. The lenses can be identified because they are 1980s style lenses that say both "Made In Japan" and "Zeiss" on them, and of course they are NOT the Yashica made Contax lenses. I think they may have been an offshoot of the lens line for the Praktica Bayonet Mount cameras, that those lenses be available in other mounts.

 

that being said, i agree with almost everybody on this post. CZJ was not the same as their West German counterparts, and the lawsuits over the name to the contrary, by virtue of location, history, and the design of their products, they had as much right to be part of the tradition as anybody. I don't think anyone will will ever be disappointed by the optical performance of a properly adjusted CZJ lens. It is true that build quality and assembly, towards the end, could be shoddy at times. Same with the Praktica cameras -- earlier is usually better made than later.

I have a range of CZJ lenses, from the 20mm Flektogon to the 135mm S (Sonnar), and they are exceptional performers. Since most of my lenses are Contax-fit Zeiss lenses, I wouldn't have given the CZJ lenses house room unless they were good performers. There is a case, as Alan Chin remarks, for considering certain modern Japanese rebranded lenses as having nothing more in common with Zeiss of any flavour than the badge (which I've seen advertised in the most ludicrously exaggerated terms on Ebay), and nothing at all optically; the original post here is largely mis-informative and misleading.

I have used several 50MM "Jena" Tessars in Exakta mount (on a Topcon Super D). And found them to be outstanding performers. Since these are available for under $100, in Exakta mount. I don't think that they're being over priced like the M42 Jena's.

The reason (I believe) that M42 CZJ lenses are rising in price and Exaktas are not is the availability of M42 adapters for Canon DSLRs.

Yeah my Super Ikonta C lens is a Zeiss manufactured in Jena...prewar and pre-iron curtain. I consider it to be fully "Zeiss"

Yes, there were some good CZJ lenses like the Zeiss Pancolar and Sonnar but they were let down by poor quality control and poor materials. You will be hard pressed to find any CZJ lens now that will focus smoothly - a result of the inferior lubricants used. Based on my own buying experiences, many of the stop-down mechanisms have also ceased to function. Pick up any Pentax Super Takumar though from the same period and they all still seem to function properly and focus as smoothly as silk.

Quote David M:

"Pick up any Pentax Super Takumar though from the same period and they all still seem to function properly and focus as smoothly as silk."

 

One wouldn't be so quick to point this out if they had seen what comes in for repairs. I've had numerous Super Taks here for focus and aperture issues. It's not unusual for any mechanical thing to need service when it is pushing the 50+ year mark, as many CJZ lenses are now.

 

And this is not to say there is anything wrong with the Pentax product either. Well known to be a high quality product.

The availability of cheap M42-EOS adapters does explain much of the current pricing of CZJ lenses. Although it's true that many of them require re-lubricating, that's no big surprise, they're up to half a century old. My two Tessars had stiff focussing, for example. Taking them apart is quite easy, even for an all-thumbs tinkerer like myself, and once cleaned out and re-lubed, the focussing is back good as new. The Tessars are very easy to take apart. Both of them also had sticky stop-down mechanisms. These, too, are fairly easy to fix, being (in my cases anyway) due to nothing more than some old grease having migrated to the blades and rendering them sticky enough to be stronger than the spring that works the stop-down. That's not an 'East German' problem - I've had old cameras of similar vintage from Stuttgart where the focusing has been a casualty of aged lubricant. My two CZJ 135s work perfectly, without any attention from me, and my Flek 35 and Flek 20/2.8 likewise work well. A previous Flek 20/4 had sticky blades. Given the age of these lenses, a few problems of this nature should not be unexpected. The performance achieved merits the attention that may be required.

Few months ago, i have purchased for 50 Euros (around 35 bucks) a CZJ Flektogon 35 mm f/ 2,8 MC in M42 thread mount, in mint conditions. I have shoot a Sensia II roll, with this lens, on my Bessaflex TM, at the historical palaces and churchs in Lecce (Italy). The results was very stunning, beyond every expectation, in sharpness, contrast and colour rendition. Ciao.

"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...

i notice that the OP has not returned to defend any of this load of borscht.....