understanding history of ZI ???

[haagen_dazs]

Newbie here.

1)
Is ZI related to CZ or ZI =CZ ?
From their website, its a merger of 4 companies long ago.

2)
Why would CZ want to make lens for ZI when CZ already has the contax bodies working for them?

3)
Why do german companies always end with AG?

thanks for englightening me

 

[VinceC]

Carl Zeiss company makes a Zeiss-Ikon camera. They've made/licensed several camera under the Contax name, with several different mounts. The Zeiss Ikon is a reentry into the quality interchangeable-lens rangefinder market, possibly as a prestige maneuver.

German companies end in AG for the same reason U.S. companies in INC.

 

[haagen_dazs]

so the ZI camera is indeed a CZ creation.
but why did they have to get 4 companies to help make the camera?

Will CZ still continue to make lenses for the contax or will they stop and concentrate on the ZI line up?

 

[JohnL]

AFAIK, the COntax brand is dead, at least for now. Maybe it'll get resurrected someday.
AG standards for Aktien Gesellschaft (did I spell that right?) which means stock corporation, more or less. CMIIW.

 

[Socke]

so the ZI camera is indeed a CZ creation.
but why did they have to get 4 companies to help make the camera?

Will CZ still continue to make lenses for the contax or will they stop and concentrate on the ZI line up?

It's only two companies, Carl Zeiss and Cosina. In the old days when germany had a flourishing camera industry there where mergers and spin offs like in todays electronics industries.

I don't think Zeiss still makes lenses for Contax, Kyocera sells off old stock and this is it. Newly made Zeiss lenses are for Leica M-Mount and Nikon F-Mount cameras. The first includes the current Zeiss Ikon and the last the current Fuji and Nikon digital SLRs as well as the modular Sinar M camera.

They made the lenses in the Mars Express sattelite, make lenses for the most expensive movie cameras, binoculars, lithography etc. etc.

 

[SDK]

haagen_dazs , see http://www.zeissikon.com/making_intro.htm for the story of why and how the new Zeiss Ikon and ZM lenses are made. Basically, Zeiss parted ways with Kyocera, because Kyocera wanted out of the camera business. However, Kyocera still owns the contractual right to use the brand name CONTAX for a few years. Carl Zeiss wanted to keep their company name in the photography business (only a small fraction of their output) and decided to revive the IKON brand name, last used in the mid Twentieth Century. Ironically, Zeiss decided their best course was to release lenses in their old nemesis' Leica M mount. Recently they also decided to add manual focus lenses for SLRs, under the initials ZF, for Nikon F mount, and ZS, for 42mm universal thread mount (invented by Zeiss and used by Praktica and Pentax among many others). See http://www.guru.org/~jdorff/zeiss/ and http://www.zeiss.de/C12567A8003B58B9?Open for more information on the SLR lenses.

 

[amateriat]

so the ZI camera is indeed a CZ creation.
but why did they have to get 4 companies to help make the camera?

Here's the Cliff Notes version of Carl Zeiss history. Everyone, feel free to fill in any gaps or correct any gaffes on my part.

Zeiss-Ikon started more or less as a conglomeration of several smaller faltering camera companies in the mid-late 1920s, bought by Carl Zeiss to compete with the then-new Leica from E. Leitz (both Zeiss and Leitz started out as optical companies manufacturing microscopes and the like; the photographic stuff came along in the 1920s). This incarnation of CZ lasted into the early 1970s. Carl Zeiss in the meantime also provided lenses for the likes of Hasselblad, Rollei and others. Zeiss, IMO, was never really into the idea of making their own camera bodies, prefering others to sweat the details...provided the cameras were up to snuff by ZI standards. The Contax SLRs of the mid-70s up to just recently were the handiwork of Yashica (later absorbed by Kyocera) in cooperation with Zeiss, basically carrying on a Zeiss tradition, with the slight twist of Zeiss actually outsourcing the maufacture of many of the lenses while riding shotgun on quality control - Zeiss quality for more people, if not exactly everyone. The new ZI came about in a similar vein, this time with Cosina as a partner in camera and lens manufacture. From what I've seen, they've done a pretty good job.

Will CZ still continue to make lenses for the contax or will they stop and concentrate on the ZI line up?

Contax/Kyocera ceased manufacture of all photographic equipment (film and digital) a relative short time ago, ostensibly because of market pressure. IMO, their disastrous, rushed introduction of the Contax N digital SLR was probably the blow that ultimately sank them. They were also slow on the uptake with introducing a viable AF SLR, first deciding to ignore the market, then introducing the Contax AX which attempted to offer AF capability to the non-AF Zeiss optics in the system (let's just say the concept was a salient one, while the execution left something to be desired), then totally confused the market by introducing the Contax N (film version, preceding the N digital), with a new lens mount and new series of CZ autofocus lenses...precisely what they said they wouldn't do. In the end, the company clearly didn't know which end was up.

And, the current ZI offerings have no connection whatever to Contax/Kyocera's offerings. It does seem you need a scorecard to figure these guys out in particular.

(Whew...)


- Barrett

 

[drmatthes]

AG is for "Aktiengesellschaft" which can be translated as "Shares Corporation".

To cut it very short, in 1926 Zeiss Ikon formed out of Ernemann (Dresden), ICA (Dresden), Contessa-Nettel (Stuttgart) and Goerz (Berlin) to produce a wide (and sometimes chaotic) range of optical equipment ...good hunting grounds for collectors.

After WWII Zeiss Ikon also incorporated Voigtländer that formerly had belonged to the Schering chemical company. That's why we see Zeiss Ikon-Voigtländer models up to the early 1970s, just before ZI collapsed.

All ZI brand names were taken over by the West German Carl Zeiss Foundation, the head organization of Carl Zeiss.

The brand "Ikon" was then sold to a swedish producer of door locks (the second thing ZI used to be famous for in Germany), and "Contax" went over to Yashica (later Kyocera) in Japan.

The brand "Zeiss Ikon" was kept and is now used in the new ZI body, also from Japan (Cosina, who also produce the Voigtänder equipment nowadays). The new ZI is NOT a German camera, therefore.

The "Contax" brand will still be held by Kyocera, but most probably without any further use in new products, for a couple of years and will probably fall back to Carl Zeiss, whatever they may do with it (I'm speculating about a camera from Japan with that name, in the line of the ZI body now).

Carl Zeiss in its own right has never produced Cameras but always optical instruments and lenses. So you can find many (but not all) ZI cameras with Carl Zeiss Lenses.

The story gets more complicated after WWII when Carl Zeiss split into the the East German Jena and the new West German Oberkochen plant, and when CZJ finally lost an international trial - and eventually its brand name in the international market.

CZJ produced lenses up to 1991 and was then partly taken over by Carl Zeiss Oberkochen. Another spinoff is Jenoptik / Jenimage.

Gosh, it's raising more questions than it answers...

Jesko

________________

2006 AD
800 yrs Dresden
80 yrs Zeiss Ikon

 

[Socke]

The "Contax" brand will still be held by Kyocera, but most probably without any further use in new products, for a couple of years and will probably fall back to Carl Zeiss, whatever they may do with it (I'm speculating about a camera from Japan with that name, in the line of the ZI body now).

Rumor has it that the Contax 645 design belongs to Zeiss and not to Kyocera and that there is an improved 645 II for which they just need somebody capable of producing it.

The Contax 645 mated to a 16MPixel Kodak DCSPro back is still my dream SLR 🙂

 

[drmatthes]

Nice dream this is!

To further "confuse" the community, there has been a very good thread dealing with CZ lens history in this forum

http://www.rangefinderforum.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6777

Jesko

_______________

AD 2006
800 yrs Dresden
80 yrs Zeiss Ikon

and Frauenkirche rebuilt!
www.frauenkirche-dresden.org/

 

[VinceC]

>>several smaller faltering camera companies in the mid-late 1920s, bought by Carl Zeiss to compete with the then-new Leica from E. Leitz...<<
>>To cut it very short, in 1926 Zeiss Ikon formed out of Ernemann (Dresden), ICA (Dresden), Contessa-Nettel (Stuttgart) and Goerz (Berlin) to produce a wide (and sometimes chaotic) range of optical equipment ...<<

I don't think the Zeiss camera line was developed to compete with the Leica. Zeiss produced many, many variants of then-popular rollfilm cameras. The Leica was a single niche product that that catered to -- actually invented -- a specific market. The revolutionary popularity of Leica only became apparent in the early 1930s, at which time Zeiss Ikon introduced the Contax as a complete 35mm camera system (that was, in many ways, more advanced than Leica for another 20 years).

The German economy was under a great variety of pressures in the 1920s. The consolidation into Zeiss Ikon probably took place for business reasons.

 

[drmatthes]

One economic reason is said to be that Carl Zeiss (Jena at that time in the 1920s) wanted a direct hand on camera producers in order to place as many of their lenses as possible on the market.

On the other hand, the Novar and Novonar, also the Dagor and Frontar lens types, often found on Medium Format cameras, were obviously not produced by CZJ - but if the same cameras were equipped with CZJ lenses, they tended to be more expensive, mainly due to the wider apertures reached by CZJ.

Politically, Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s was a confused and stricken country that had lost a war, its royalty and much of its wealth (due to the treaty of Versailles) just a couple of years ago. The country was going through a rough period of revolutionary attacks from both left and right. On the other hand, the arts and sciences, also the technical craftsmanship, reached new heights due to republican freedom of spirit and enterprise. After the hyperinflation in 1923 and again after the Stock Exchange Crash in 1929, jobs were scarce but workers were cheap, so innovative technology could be produced at reasonable prices and also be sold on the international market, a policy which by 1933 and later was reinforced by the Nazi party and its economy specialist Hjalmar Schacht. Among other measures, they forced the trade unions and the employers together in the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (German Work Front) to ensure cheap production and avoid (or rather suppress) strikes.

This ambiguous situation of a country in both economic development and political decay at the same time is underlying the sometimes frightening success German products had at that period.

That's what I sometimes have in mind, hands on my 1925 ICA, my 1935 Leica III or my 1936 Contax, let alone the 1942 Biogon lens. What a "Fatherland"...