Anyone hear of "Aus Jena T1:6.3/f210"?

I just bought this lens from a local photography school sale. There is no lettering around the lens. It is mounted on a copal press shutter. I would appreciate hearing performance of this lens from those who have used it.

Thanks,

Tautatis.

It could be a Tessar Series IIb f6.3. A fine lens btw

Louis is right. Post-WWII coated lens from Carl Zeiss Jena (DDR).

It has to be an export model. Zeiss Oberkochem (West Germany) took legal steps to keep Zeiss Jena (East Germany) from using the trademarks Zeiss and Tessar west of the iron curtain.

Michael

T1 = Tessar. CZJ had lost the right to use the Zeiss model names (in addition to the name "Zeiss") in certain western countries.

The factory made a couple of thousand of these over their life, based on a design produced in March of 1947. The lens was produced from 1951 through 1975, with the biggest batch (1000 copies) in the last batch.

Most of these seems to be made as barrel lenses for enlargers, including that large final batch. 75 were made for old Compur shutters in two batches, in 1953 and 1958. A batch of 50 was made for Synchro Compur shutters in 1960, and one batch of 25 was made for Prestor shutters in 1965.

I can date your lens if you can find a serial number. If the ring that says "aus Jena" seems to be redundant, there might be a ring with the original Carl Zeiss Jena label underneath it. That serial number would be the important one, if it's there.

The Jena works made excellent lenses in those days, and certainly made a zillion first-quality tessars, including many that were installed in post-war Rolleiflexes.

Arne Croell wrote an article about a series of later designs that were conceived but never survived the prototype stage in the early 60's for use on a Meopta monorail camera. He might know a bit about these--he has the same production reference I do plus more.

Rick "who has an 'aus Jena' Sonnar of excellent quality" Denney