[rollei_list] Bloviating, Part 2: 2/85 Zeiss Sonnar

  • From: Marc James Small <marcsmall@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 15 Apr 2009 19:05:14 -0400

At 06:24 AM 4/14/2009, Thor Legvold wrote:
>Hi Marvin,
>
>I'm not Mark, nor do I play him on the internet, but I asked Henry
>Scherer the same thing when I was looking for a 2/85 Sonnar.
>
>Here's what he had to say:
>
>Quote:
>
>There are two  85mm f2.0 lenses.  The first was made after the war in
>Jena
>for the postwar Contax IIa.  It was made in very small numbers and is
>a T
>coated lens.  It is a very great lens being very sharp.  The second
>was made
>in West Germany after the partition of Germany.  It was advertised by
>Zeiss
>to be a portrait lens, meaning it's soft, and it certainly is.  If you
>want a
>soft  85 this will be easy because many were made.  It will also be
>relatively easy to find one in almost mint condition because they were
>not
>used being so soft.  If you want a sharp 85 that looks good this is
>going to
>be difficult and you will have to be very patient.  There are not a
>lot of
>the earlier Jena T lenses, they got used a lot and marked up because
>they are
>so sharp and so good looking ones are extremely rare.  It has taken me
>as
>long as a year to find a suitable postwar Jena T 85 2.0 Sonnar.
>
>The sharpest lens ever made for the Contax rangefinder mount is the
>postwar Jena T 85mm f2.0 Sonnar.  It is also an APO design and so does
>very well with modern color film.  They are hard to find because not a
>lot
>of them were made.  They are hard to find in beautiful condition because
>they took such great pictures and got used a lot.  But they are
>definitely
>worth the work and patience required to find.
This is going beyond bloviating. It is either some sort of psychosis or drug-induced frenzy. Henry is simply distorting the known historical pattern. His motives might be simple self-importance but, in any event, he is just flat wrong.
First, the Postwar CZJ 2/8.5cm Sonnar was not produced in small numbers; it was produced in fairly large numbers in Contax RF BM and Arriflex up to 1950. The mounts are junk, as the Soviets at that time would not permit the East Germans the use of decent metals or decent lubricants, but there is nothing wrong with the optical formulae of the lenses. All but a very few of the Postwar Sonnars were made to a 1939 design; at the very end, the mavens of Jena used a 1947 reformulation for a few small runs, mainly for the Arriflex cine camera. Henry ought to invest in Thiele's books which include the surviving factory records: again, these are not perfect, but, together with Charlie Barringer's Zeiss Lens List, they provide a fairly complete picture.
Second, the Postwar Zeiss-Opton and Carl Zeiss 2/85 Sonnar was NOT designed as a portrait lens and Henry is just a cow wafting over the Moon to suggest such. The 1947 formulation was a coöperative effort between Jena and Oberkochen, with lens designers shifting back and forth to produce a marginally better design than that of the 1939 formula. By 1950, Zeiss had lost the ability to trade freely with the nationalized entities in East Germany and so were cut off from supplies of the fine optical glasses produced by the former Schott und Genossen works at Jena. So, Dr Hans Sauer -- he of the Tessar and Planar -- reworked the Sonnar design to produce the best performance in light of the new glasses being made by the relocated Schott works at Mainz. (Zeiss and Zeiss Ikon went through epic struggles to relocate out of the hands of the Great Sweating Proletarian Masters of Labour Delight, but the untold tale is that the most epic of these might have been the VERY rapid development of an entirely new optical glass industry using new sands and new machinery). In any event, the 1951 formulation as produced at Oberkochen is as satisfactory in terms of most optical parameters, if not better, than the earlier Jena version: understand that the Jena lens was out of production by the time Oberkochen started producing them.
The 2/8.5cm or 2/85 Sonnar is a remarkable lens as it provides a nice, crisp, sharp image even wide open. I own a bunch of these guys in various guises and from various factories and, other than variations in mounts, I have seen no significant distinctions in optical performance. I see no reason to believe that the Oberkochen Contax RF BM and Contarex BM lens was not the best of the breed, though I have yet to do a shoot-off with my newly acquired National Bureau of Standards lens charts.
Henry is clearly misreading the language from the 1961 Zeiss Ikon US catalogue, where it is said, "This Sonnar combines a medium telephoto effect ith high lens speed and it is preferably used in sports, stage, and press photography. Professionals also prefer this lens for taking portraits as it yields a large image from a distance, thus reducing the perspective distortion inevitable with shorter-focus lenses." That is the only reference I can find to a claim by Carl Zeiss that this lens was suitable for portraiture and note the caveats: the lens is suitable as it is a medium-telephoto lens. We Rolleiflex TLR users frequently note that the sole drawback to the camera is that it is not a decent portrait taker due to its normal-lens format. Of course, a Tele-Mutar or Duonar helps this out quite a bit!
In any event, it grates on my nerves to read that Henry is cited as a source. PLEASE ask others whose information does not devolve from Henry and you will often receive rather different answers. For that matter, Thor, why do you not subscribe to the Zeiss Ikon Collectors' Group? There is a tremendous nexus of knowledge there, most of it a bit distrusting of Henry Schering's pronouncements. 

Marc


msmall@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Cha robh bàs fir gun ghràs fir!

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