Rise and fall of lens manufacturers

[Dan Fromm]

Hmm. I thought lenses were made in other countries than the US, GB, Germany and Japan. France and Italy, in particular. Switzerland, too.

What, if anything, fell on those countries' optical goods makers?

[Bob Salomon]

"Voigtländer never made a Exakta mount lens. They doubtlessly shot themselves in the foot, and deservedly were the first to fail (and be gobbled up by Zeiss). For some reason they seem to have considered their lenses a sales argument for their (compared to the lenses, mostly quirky and outdated) cameras rather than a product of its own. They were fiercely competitive and did not sell their lenses to or for any cameras they considered level or down-market from their own (so that a few Leica and Contax lenses are the only ones with a alien mount). "

And don't forget, at the end Voigtlander was owned by Rollei so Voigtlander branded cameras made by Rollei had Voigtlander branded lenses.

[Ian Greenhalgh]

Maybe I never look in the right places, but I rarely or never see Skoparon or Skoparex lenses from the early 50's, though I see earlier ones on Voigtlander folders. What camera were they made for? Angenieux is credited with the first retrofocus lens (for cine) in, I seem to recall, 1948 or '49. Zeiss Jena was right there within a year with the Flektogon, and Schneider a bit behind that with the Curtagon. I don't recall when Oberkochen came out with the Distagon, but it was probably right about the same time as the Curtagon. These were the first retrofocus lenses for SLRs, where the glass had to be in front of the mirror box, that I know of. Flektogons were popular on Practica cameras, and were also made from the mid-50's well into the 80's for medium format (in the Pentacon Six mount). The Wirgen I mentioned used Schneider lenses, and also used the Practica M42 screw mount (which was later adopted by Pentax). Zeiss Oberkochen started making Zeiss Ikon SLRs in the 50's, but, as you say, behind others (still ahead of the Japanese, though)--and before that time, Zeiss's main camera products were Ikonta folders and Contax rangefinders.

Really, Exakta was the real first SLR, and a camera I know little about, especially what lenses were made for it. Maybe that's the camera those Skoparons and Skoparexes were made for--perhaps you can say. But the pre-war Exaktas were made in Dresden and I would have thought Meyer would have been major supplier, as they were to Practica-Dresden after the war (later, of course, both were rolled into VEB Pentacon, eventually along with Zeiss Jena). I've always thought of Practica being the post-war successor to Exakta.

Yes, Schneider was already in the west and that helped them. But I'll bet the Americans pumped more money into Zeiss Oberkochen than into Schneider--they helped create that branch in the western zone and move the best Jena experts there to prevent the Soviets from getting all the technology. Of course, the Soviets crated up much of the tooling at the Jena works and sent it to Kiev, but that's another story.

Rick "who needs to look back through Kingslake again" Denney

Hi Rick

Voigtlander only made lenses for their own 35mm cameras. In rangefinders, this was the Vitessa and Prominent. In SLRs, the Bessamatic followed by the Ultramatic.

The Skoparon/Skoparex were one of the first retrofocal designs, they basically took a four element Skopar and stuck a large fifth element in front to widen the fov.

The Ultron was a 6 element double-gauss design and inspired many similar lenses from the Japanese makers.

1950-56 Voigtlander's 35mm lenses were probably the best available, but then Zeiss got their new designs to market. The Icarex released as a Zeiss Ikon camera was actually designed and built by Voigtlander. The lenses are labelled Zeiss but are also designed and built by Voigtlander. They are really superb optics, the 'Tessar' for Icarex is actually a Color-Skopar renamed and is a better lens than the contemporary Zeiss Tessar 2.8/50 from either east or west halves of Zeiss.

The Japanese industry just copied German designs wholesale, sometimes they modified them a bit. This was facilitated by the US - German patents were declared invalid in Japan so we got cameras like the Nikon rangefinders that were basically a Contax with a Leica cloth shutter and a Retina style rangefinder. This camera wouldn't have been possible without the invalidation of German patents. The Nikon lenses for their RF cams were pretty much just copies of the Zeiss Sonnars for the Contax. It wasn't until the late 50s that the Japanese started to innovate and develop their own designs. Pentax really cribbed their early designs directly from the Germans, the SLRs were very much inspired/copied from the early GDR SLRs such as the Praktiflex and Praktica. Even the name was stolen from the Germans - Pentax was a contraction of 'Pentaprism Contax' and was what Zeiss had intended to call it's SLR, but due to the lack of protection of German intellectual property in the post-war period, Asahi just stole it. That is why the GDR SLRs were labelled Pentacon, a slightly less nice sounding contraction of 'Pentaprism Contax'. Pentax also stole lens designs from Voigtlander - the Ultron design became the normal lens and the Skoparon design became the Takumar 3.5/35. Topcon copied the Exakta bayonet mount, as did Mamiya, there are many other examples of the Japanese copying the Germans in the post-war period, which was facilitated by the US as they wanted to rebuild Japan ASAP as a bulwark in the east against Communism.

Meyer in the GDR were making really excellent lenses until the late 60s, then quality started to drop, this was because the GDR gave priority to Zeiss Jena and Meyer had to make do with whatever materials and resources were left over. If you compare the Meyer lenses of the early 60s to their CZJ equivalents, they are every bit as good - the Primotar 3.5/50 is at least as good as the Tessar 3.5/50, the Primagon 4.5/35 is at least as good as the Flektogon 2.8/35 and the Primoplan 1.9/58 is very similar to the Biotar 2/58.

[Bernice Loui]

The common individual between Zeiss and Meyer is lens designer Paul Rudolph.. He was at Zeiss initially, then went on to Meyer.

Individuals who were the actual lens designers are more significant then the companies they worked for as the companies products are a result of their intellectual efforts.

Following the history of the specific designer, where they did their work and the products they designed tells much about the history of optics and photographic technology. Companies and products are very much the result of intellectual/academic work of an individual. When design by committee happens, the results are most often a mixed batch of in-coherent ideas that may not gel.

Speaking of Paul Rudolph, he dismissed Emile von Hoegh Dagor lens design, the Dagor.


Bernice

In a separate thread we took a discussion off topic talking about Meyer and Zeiss. May be we should continue here as it's something not often discussed:








Ian

[Ian Greenhalgh]

That's a good point about lens designers. To understand the post-war developments, men like Albrecht Tronnier and Erhard Glatzel should be studied. Their work laid the foundations for modern lens design.

[rdenney]

...The core parts of Pentacon ended up in the Manderman empire in 1991, but only the third and revised reissue of the E66 from 97-2000 was made at the former Pentacon plant in Seidnitz (sp?) - in the interim years, Exakta Nuremberg continued with parts from GDR and immediate post GDR times.

And yet that Model III of the Exakta 66 was the only one to correct the fundamental deficiencies of the Pentacon Six film advance system. Even so, it didn't correct them all. I know--I own one (and a Pentacon Six from the last couple of years of production). I sent mine for overhaul (which did not solve all the problems) to Pentacon Dresden--that was the only factory there was by that time. That was in maybe 2003 or so.

Rick "noting that the Pentacon Six TL and Exakta 66 look mostly identical under the skin" Denney

[rdenney]

The UK will have been different, as they had steep import taxes directed against anything outside the Commonwealth and were only reachable by ship, so that Japanese and European/German makers had pretty much the same conditions - on the continent it took longer before the German camera industry lost its competitiveness.

I dunno. The Nikon F didn't replace the Speed Graphic as the default press camera until the early 60's. And the first SLR owned by many American amateurs was the Pentax Spotmatic, but that was also in the 60's. Before that, serious amateurs bought Rolleiflexes, it seems to me, or the Kodak Retina Reflex, or the Argus C3. I don't recall any history of Japanese SLR's being on the American market in the 50's, but Practicas and Contarexes were available. Adnsel Adams used a Contarex, for example, when he used a 35mm SLR.

Rick "who owned a Yashica Lynx, and still has a 1953 Xenar-equipped Rolleiflex 3.5" Denney

[rdenney]

Meyer in the GDR were making really excellent lenses until the late 60s, then quality started to drop, this was because the GDR gave priority to Zeiss Jena and Meyer had to make do with whatever materials and resources were left over. If you compare the Meyer lenses of the early 60s to their CZJ equivalents, they are every bit as good - the Primotar 3.5/50 is at least as good as the Tessar 3.5/50, the Primagon 4.5/35 is at least as good as the Flektogon 2.8/35 and the Primoplan 1.9/58 is very similar to the Biotar 2/58.

Not the medium-format Meyers. The Orestegor is a simple, four-element 300mm telephoto for the Pentacon Six mount, but it's not on the same planet quality-wise as the 300mm Jena Sonnar. Even the barrels were not as nice--the Meyer was a preset while the CZJ Sonnar had an automatic aperture. The only one to bridge the quality gap in the longer lens was the 500mm Prakticar, which was a Meyer lens that was not too bad for the day, though it had no competition in the Second World.

The Primotar 80mm normal lens for the P6 was not that highly thought of compared to the CZJ Tessar, but both were case aside in favore of the Biometar, which was a 5-element post-war Planar design (almost identical to the Xenotar). And Meyer had nothing to offer to compete with the Flektogon.

But, as has been said, Meyer was really picked clean by the Soviets, much worse than the Jena works.

Rick "who thought it was Miranda, not Mamiya, who copied the Exakta mount, but that memory is really vague at this point" Denney

[Sevo]

Meyer in the GDR were making really excellent lenses until the late 60s, then quality started to drop, this was because the GDR gave priority to Zeiss Jena

Zeiss Jena kept separate from Pentacon until 1985 (when Pentacon was merged to Zeiss Jena, not vice versa), and did not suffer the same degradation to the bottom end of the Western photography market as Pentacon. On the other hand, Meyer/Pentacon lenses soon outnumbered Jena by magnitudes - Jena had always been in a high-price niche not much requested within the Comecon and hard to market in the West. By the seventies the plan assigned Jena to military lens, microscope, telescope, tool and electronics production, and they continued to make only a few speciality camera lenses (notably, for us, the barrel mount LF Tessars and process lenses). But when they absorbed Pentacon, even that production line was moved over to a former Meyer plant.

[Ian Greenhalgh]

Hi Rick

I caught myself in a generalisation about Meyer, I was only talking about the 35mm lenses, I forgot about the MF stuff, of which i don't have any experience.

Miranda copied the external diaphragm linkage for their earliest models but the mount was substantially different, it was a breechlock type. Mamiya used the Exakta mount on an SLR that I forget the name of now, I used to have one, Canon made the standard lens for it, which is the only lens Canon ever made in that mount.

Hi Sevo

CZJ certainly kept up large scale production of some models such as the Tessar 2.8/50, Pancolar 1.8/50, Sonnar 3.5/135, Flektogon 2.8/35, there are just so many of them in circulation. The 1980's era Zeiss in the bayonet mount for the Praktica B series are much less common, I see very few of them for sale, so maybe it wasn't until the 80s that they scaled back production of camera lenses? Certainly, late 70s Sonnar 135s and Tessar 50s are very common indeed in the UK.