Overview of all Zeiss Sonnar 5cm f/1.5 aka 50mm f/1.5 versions

It is awesome and will be appreciated by many that you are collecting and making available this information about these lenses. Thank goodness that this information will not fade away with time. Thank you for doing this, and thank you for sharing it with us.
 
Hi, firstly, that's a great amount of work, thanks very much. I own exactly one F/1.5 Zeiss Sonnar lens you can add to your database. It has the serial number Nr 2859195 from an early postwar batch CJZ69 it appears. The lens is LTM mount, parts of the serial number are inscribed on the rear element carrier and scratched on the helicoid section too. I don't have the item in my current location to add photos unfortunately.

I do have a couple of questions from browsing your lists of batches and serial numbers. I noticed a series of 'codes' used in one column, I managed to work out what some the the acronyms means, others are not so clear. The codes I refer to are as such: v4b ZJ CR as. I worked out that v4b is the optical version, ZJ means Zeiss Jena and CR means Contax Rangefinder, but I don't know what the 'as' is or any of the codes that appear in that position. Would it be possible to get a guide for what those codes refer to.
The other question refers to questions of the original configuration of lenses in particular batches. There is of course intense interest in the LTM lenses manufactured during wartime and the period immediately following. For instance the lens I own is listed by Thiele using original factory records as being from a batch that was manufactured for Contax rangefinder mount, not LTM. Is this the last word on the subject? When I look at the list of recorded serial numbers from that batch of 5000, both LTM lenses and CR lenses are listed, there are more LTM lenses than CR. I'm interested to know from the very knowledgeable members here more on that subject.
 
To me- the last word on these lenses is revealed when taking them apart and finding Serial Numbers on the internal components. I have a lens close in SN to yours, and have worked on others in the same batch. They were completed as LTM lenses, the inner parts have unique serial numbers consistent with earlier lenses designated in Thiele as made in LTM.
 
Yes, the "codes" are short identifiers of every variation I have found. I tried to give them a meaningful identifier since simply numbering them had the problem that I could not fit in new found variations.

I used the identifiers in the guide. So it is easy to look them up.

vividlyfading.blogspot.com

Zeiss Sonnar 50mm F/1.5 - regular Versions and Specs

Spec Sheet In the following overview you can find all regular Sonnar 5cm f/1,5 / 50mm F/1,5 versions Zeiss has produced. You can find t...
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You are right the first part is the optical claculation. v1b stands for first productive optical calculation from Bertele. v4k = 4th calculation altered by KMZ
The second part is the manufacturer. CJ = CZJ, ZE = Carl Zeiss Jena East Germany, ZO = Zeiss Oberkochen West Germany, ZC = Carl Zeiss West Germany, ZK = KMZ & ZOMZ, VA = Valdai, LO = Lomography
The third part is the mount of the lens with only 2 letters. CR = Contax Rangefinder, CF = Contaflex, LT = LTM, LM = Leica M, AF = Arriflex, RB = RSBK, KF = KEF, SP = Super Parvo, RT = Robot Royal, NS = Nikon S, M7 = M27, A1 = A1
The last part are mostly abbreviations of something that gives the lens a distinction. bn8 = black Nickel F8, br = black ring, cd = all Chrome, diagonal mount, abbb = aluminum with black focus triangle with block pin with black rear mount, arrs = aluminum with red focus triangle with red dot on pin with silver rear mount

The challenge is to keep the identifier short and do not introduce duplicates. 😀

Regarding the list of collected serials and the LTM Sonnars. There is a little bit in the guide about it but the most part is left out for now. It does not belong in the guide. It is a separate chapter I or someone else might write in the future. The collection of serials show a little bit of light what happened 1946. CZJ did their planning of lens production in the Soviet occupied zone. They expected that they could resume their business as before the war. They were struck by the Soviet relocation order of the Jena plant that came out of the blue. The Soviets took everything from tools, machines, documents, people, glass, finished and unfinished lenses, parts and material. They moved everything to Krasnogorsk and the 200 workers and engineers from CZJ that had to move too had a hard time to restart the production near Moscow. It seems like it was quite a mess. They started easy by assembling and finishing those unfinished lenses they took. I have a LTM Sonnar with CZJ lens ring that looks to be finished there. There are a lot of 1948 - 50 Jupiters that have a Jena engraved serial on the rear end. I tried to put them in the collection so people can draw their conclusions what and when everything happened.

There are some batches in the Thiele book completely missing although I tried hard to find a single lens. We talk about the post-war years here.

Then there are black market and Soviet fakes too. I tried to mark suspicious lenses by red color and an F at the end of the identifier. There are a lot of stories about those lenses created in that time. Enough for more block posts I think. Unfortunately I have no secret knowledge about the whole production. My knowledge comes from the collected serials. People like Brian, Skyllaney, Marco Cavina and others here know way more about this topic.
 
A small update to the overview of Sonnar 5cm f/1.5 variations. I added pictures of the f8+ variation, replaced the pictures of the wartime LTM Sonnar and finally added pictures of aperture blades for most of the lenses.

I had to replace the pictures of the LTM Sonnar because my first copy was engraved by KMZ. I noticed a strange looking 4 letter in the focus scale and I figured that this lens has been finished by KMZ. A further proof that the Soviets took unfinished lenses, moved everything to Krasnogorsk and finished those lenses in the plant near Moscow. Luckily I could get another authentic LTM Sonnar and reshot everything. Both lenses are very sharp but struggle a little bit to reach infinity.
 
@Räuber

Just Wow. One inexpensive lens that you can add: an earlier J-8M, made in the early to middle 1960s. The optics are different. The Middle Group is a triplet, but has a flat surface between the 2nd and 3rd element, but- the 3rd element has a smaller diameter. I suspect that caused a lot of centering problems, and the design was changed ~1972 or so. The two J-8M lenses that I had from the 1960s were terrible. The 1970s J-8M I have now is great.

The published formula- J-8M came out ~1959 or so.
J-8 vs J-8M.
jupiter-8-and-jupiter-8m-optical-scheme-difference.jpgJ8_COMP3.jpgJ8_COMP4.jpg

All surfaces are curved... Only one way to find out. I did.
RIMG1294.JPGJ8_COMP2.jpg
 
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Thank you @Sonnar Brian I haven't read about optical changes of Jupiter-8 lenses yet. Great to know more about this topic. I have a 1977 Jupiter-8M (second from left last row). The coating is yellow-orange and it is quite good compared to other Sonnar lenses I own.

The shown selection is only a very small part of available variations. Currently I have count 36 variations. For most of them I have one (or more) examples here. Some cheap ones are still on the list and others are so rare and expensive I will not rely on pictures and information from other sources.

This is only a teaser. It will take some time to bring a basic overview online. Expect that there will be a spreadsheet list of all variations and a very basic overview with images first. I will then flesh out the the overview over time.
 
I was asked to open up and clean some haze from an "F9.5" Sonnar 5cm F1.5. This lens was ordered Two Months after the first batch of 100 lenses. The original Sonnar 5cm F1.5 stops down to F8. This one stops down to F9.5, denoted by a Dot just past F8. You would think it was the same mechanical and optical design of the v1 lens, with the slots for the aperture bored out slightly. Wrong.

Slide2.JPGSlide3.JPG

So maybe it was an early version of the slightly later v2 Sonnar that stops down to F11.
Nope.

Compared with my v2 Sonnar. Note- I picked up this lens as a Barrel only, and made the aperture linkage, aperture ring, and mount.
BUT- look at the
Slide4.JPG
 
Sonnar Brian said:
I was asked to open up and clean some haze from an "F9.5" Sonnar 5cm F1.5. This lens was ordered Two Months after the first batch of 100 lenses. The original Sonnar 5cm F1.5 stops down to F8. This one stops down to F9.5, denoted by a Dot just past F8. You would think it was the same mechanical and optical design of the v1 lens, with the slots for the aperture bored out slightly. Wrong.

View attachment 4840297View attachment 4840298

So maybe it was an early version of the slightly later v2 Sonnar that stops down to F11.
Nope.

Compared with my v2 Sonnar. Note- I picked up this lens as a Barrel only, and made the aperture linkage, aperture ring, and mount.
BUT- look at the
View attachment 4840300
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Quite impressive how much research is being done on early Sonnars by RFF members! Thanks for you work, @Sonnar Brian.
 
Is it possible to describe in one sentence what is so special about the Sonnar look?

If you had to tell a total newbie who is going to buy the newest asph apo whatever 😉
 
Sonnar Brian said:
Sonnars are a perfect blend of imperfections.
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I guess that answers the "One Sentence" question.

I like how they handle color and IQ. And the manufacturer makes no difference. All can do it well, and some very well. I have a great '57 KMZ Jupiter 8, a sweet '42 CZJ 5cm f/1.5 and one of the Skyllaney Bertele Sonnars. Perhaps my bias but I think they do a great job delivering to the sensor good information about what they saw. And as the sensor improves so, too, do they.

In order of listing above, KMZ, CZJ, Skyllaney

 
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Sonnar_1661x_isV3.jpgSonnar_1661x_isV3_2.jpgSonnar175xV3_145xV2_c.jpgV2_Sonnars_two_types.jpg
So I got curious. I know the 1607xxx Sonnars I own are v2 optical formula, and the 175xxxx lens is a v3 optical formula.

The batch of 1000 lenses starting at 1660301 is stated to be completed in Thiele on 5/18/1935.
Lens 1661271 uses the v3 Optical formula. It is towards the end of the batch, so what is unknown is if all of them are v3 optics.
 
Thank you @Sonnar Brian again. This batch made me curious too. I looked into it because I wanted to know how far we can trust the information from CZJ itself. I have a nickel lens with black ring from batch 23, I have a chrome Sonnar from batch 25 (1661030), batch 26 (1754317) and batch 28 (1826639). I bought them to look if I could see a difference between them. Especially the batch 25 lens was of interest because I wanted to see if it has a v2 or v3 optical block. Since I can not unscrew my lenses I tried to compare them in other ways. And taking photos with the black nickel lens and the 1661k Sonnar I see a tiny difference that I interpreted as that this batch 25 lens has a newer optical calculation. So I was convinced that the batch 25 contained v3 optics already. Thank you for confirming my observations.

When I looked into the Contax lenses book of Keesing I got another idea to compare the Sonnars I own. I started to measure the diameter of the front and rear lens. And I noticed some interesting changes that a lot of times came with a new optical calculation but there are some exceptions.

v2 = front 35mm / rear 25mm
v2 (black band) = 34.3mm / 25mm
v3 (F11) = 34.3mm / 24mm
v3 (F16) = 34.5mm / 24mm
v4 (F22) = 34.5mm / 24mm
v4 (post-WWII) = 34.85mm / 22mm
v5 (Opton) = 35.2mm / 24mm
v5 (Zeiss) = 34.5mm / 24mm
v6 (C-Sonnar) 36mm / 22mm

There are several interesting changes in here. There are different front and rear diameters for most of the optical calculations. I think that the Chrome Sonnar with f11 and f16 maximum aperture use the same v3 optics but a slightly different front diameter. Another surprise was that the front and rear diameter of the v4 optical calculation did not change the diameters at all. But the post-war v4 interpretation from Jena has totally different front and rear diameters. And even though we only know of a single West-German post-war calculation (from Bertele) that was used for Contax Sonnars the diameters of the front changed from Opton to Carl Zeiss Sonnars. I can not tell if the design of the optical block changes too. But looking from the outside I would expect far more optical calculations than 6 in total.
 
Very nice job.

And yeah as stated there have to be at least a couple hundred (if not more?) "tweener" calculations for each glass type as it is cast. I do think such calculations were shown on the "Karte" example shown in the Thiele - maybe my memory is fooling me.

As for proper re-calculations - yeah I agree - there must be more than 6 calculations and the Thiele is likely missing details here.

I guess it would be unfair to blame Thiele here since Zeiss can be weird like that. I have noticed that some details are meticulously recorded some others you have to figure it out for yourself. One such example would be the many many variations of the mounting system they have made over the years - even for their own Contax mount.

Then there is the very uneven start of coating lenses. As @Sonnar Brian and I have deduced they started coating lenses as early as 1.7million I think it was - but the lenses are not so labelled. However the coating color and effectiveness is identical across not just Contax but other Zeiss products of the time to make me sure that this is not a coincidence. My personal thinking is that the coating tech was christened "T" for Transparent once it was finalized - but they did many many test runs before. And likely they do the same for optical formulae.
 
TenEleven said:
Very nice job.

And yeah as stated there have to be at least a couple hundred (if not more?) "tweener" calculations for each glass type as it is cast. I do think such calculations were shown on the "Karte" example shown in the Thiele - maybe my memory is fooling me.

As for proper re-calculations - yeah I agree - there must be more than 6 calculations and the Thiele is likely missing details here.

I guess it would be unfair to blame Thiele here since Zeiss can be weird like that. I have noticed that some details are meticulously recorded some others you have to figure it out for yourself. One such example would be the many many variations of the mounting system they have made over the years - even for their own Contax mount.

Then there is the very uneven start of coating lenses. As @Sonnar Brian and I have deduced they started coating lenses as early as 1.7million I think it was - but the lenses are not so labelled. However the coating color and effectiveness is identical across not just Contax but other Zeiss products of the time to make me sure that this is not a coincidence. My personal thinking is that the coating tech was christened "T" for Transparent once it was finalized - but they did many many test runs before. And likely they do the same for optical formulae.
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From my experience familial, by visit and and just reading and so on this uneven accounting by Zeiss is so un-German. I think of "punktlich" and "Alles im Ordnung" and so on. Maybe it was the war years and then the Russian occupation. I know relatives in Berlin in '45 ran like hell towards the US lines and away from the Russians. The Russians were very angry. So perhaps the post war occupation can explain this deviation from the norm. The plus side is that it has kept decades of Sonnar/Zeiss students busy doing research and many thanks to them for that.
 
Räuber said:
Some of you guys might know it already. I'm working on an overview of all Sonnar 5cm f/1,5 versions. It is not finished yet. But I think it could be valuable for some of you to publish it anyway.

vividlyfading.blogspot.com

Zeiss Sonnar 50mm F/1.5 - regular Versions and Specs

This page contains an overview over all regular versions of the Zeiss Sonnar 5cm f/1,5 and some of its Soviet, Japanese and Todays der...
vividlyfading.blogspot.com vividlyfading.blogspot.com

There are already 2 posts there about the Sonnar 5cm f/1,5 and Ludwig Bertele that invented it.

Photos are missing and will be coming soon. Some of the technical specs are missing but I want to redo the measurings again before posting them all. I will update the posts on this blog as I finish the documentation. So you should be coming back for more Sonnar stuff.

I can give a quick roadmap too.
  1. images of lenses
  2. full spec sheet
  3. serial numbers
  4. Trivia
  5. Zeiss History 1800-Today
Comments are welcome. 🙂
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Well done! I have just printed the draft out. As I recently purchased one of the M39 thread versions of the CZJ Sonnar f1.5 5.0cm I searched for ‘M39’ immediately and was pleased to read about that version in your report!

I am in awe of the knowledge you have!
 
Mirrorless said:
Well done! I have just printed the draft out. As I recently purchased one of the M39 thread versions of the CZJ Sonnar f1.5 5.0cm I searched for ‘M39’ immediately and was pleased to read about that version in your report!

I am in awe of the knowledge you have!
Click to expand...
PS attached is a photo:IMG_1744.jpeg
 
Mirrorless said:
PS attached is a photo:
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The Serial number is: #2866401.

I had read reports about ‘fake’ lenses but the one I have corresponds with your descriptions. I note however that the serial number is above than the top of your range (which you state as being 2862700). Welcome your thoughts.
 
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