This 80mm Tessar lens in Praktisix / Pentacon Six mount left the production line on 27th February 1958.

Most Zeiss lenses other than the 1000mm mirror lens had the same design style, so when changes of styling were introduced, they were phased in to all other Zeiss lenses except the mirror lens.

(Meyer-Optik / Görlitz did not follow these style conventions and mostly produced lenses with a black finish during the years that the Praktisix and Pentacon Six were manufactured, though lenses in the early-to-mid 1950s were bright alloy).

When buying any camera with inter-changeable lenses, bear in mind that the lens may not be the one that was on the camera when it was new. This Praktisix II was manufactured between 1964 and 1966, but the Tessar lens shown here was last produced in the Praktisix mount in February 1958. It would have been fitted to the original version of the Praktisix.

The makers of the Praktisix decided that the camera would sell better if it had the option of a more prestigious standard lens than the four-element Tessar, although we should not forget that at the time the first Hasselblads were also being supplied in many markets with a Tessar lens. (However, the Meyer-Optik Primotar continued to be offered as an economical alternative for a number of years.)

The first 80mm Biometars for the Praktisix had the same cosmetic style as the Tessar illustrated above – mostly alloy, with a black leather focussing band.

However, some of the lenses later in the same production run(!) of 7,000 80mm Biometar lenses introduced a style change: a plastic band with bumps on it was used on the focussing ring instead of the leather band. The lens illustrated on the right here was part of that first production run. It rather looks as though the manufacturers used up their stocks of leather bands before starting to use the plastic rings with the bumps – or perhaps the plastic rings were a component that was not ready at the beginning of the production run, a situation that regularly occurred in the post-war years in East Germany.

Pentacon Six brochures produced in 1966 and 1967 show lenses with this finish. However, this particular lens completed the final stage of manufacture on 17th December 1964, and it would probably have been supplied on a late Praktisix IIA.

One 1968 brochure also shows lenses with this finish, but the lenses must have been taken from earlier production runs, as the mostly-black lens style with a leather band on the focussing ring had entered production in 1965 – see the next section.

This “bumpy ring” was not very reliable. With rough handling it could easily crack or work loose, so a return was made to a leather band.

For this lens the aperture index ring, the focussing ring and the whole of the filter ring were black. The aperture selection ring was still plain metal with red numbers.

The next version of the lens – the famous “zebra” design – was in production by 1967.

Each time there was a style change, all the lenses within the range were made to the same cosmetic style.
This 65mm Flektogon was completed on 27 May 1967. However, the changes were gradual (presumably as parts were used up). See more about this below.

Note that – as with previous versions of the lens – the feet (red) and metres (white) distance markings continue to be shown on this lens, which was finished on 19th July 1978.

Note the lack of feet markings – export to the U.K. and the USA had long since been abandoned.

Notice also that the front edge of the focussing ring is now black.

There are two main differences between the two lenses:
1) As with the 80mm Biometars above, the the front edge of the focussing ring on the 1978 lens has a shiny polished metal finish, while on the 1990 lens this edge is black.
2) If you look carefully, you will just be able to see that the 1978 lens has distances marked in metres (in white) and in feet (in red), while the 1990 lens only has distances in meters.

Those who look at every detail will observe that the placing of the letters “MC” is different on the two lenses. In fact, the lettering on the front ring of the newer lens is also larger and less spaced-out.

The two lenses have projected images of the window opposite them onto the background (naturally, upside-down!).

As indicated above, constant shortages were a factor in life in post-war Germany (and in East Germany right up to the end, in 1989!). Components, once manufactured, had to be used, and this, of course led to the gradual introduction of changes across the lens range. This is a source of multiple small variations in the details of the lenses that were produced. (This is fascinating – or frustrating! – for lens collectors!)

This can be seen in the illustrations of equipment in much of the manufacturer’s literature. The image to the right is taken from a 1964 Praktisix II brochure. In it, the 80mm Biometar and the 65mm Flektogon have the plain alloy finish with the leather focussing band (as in the first image above), while the 50mm Flektogon, the 120mm Biometar and the 180mm Sonnar have black rings for the focussing and aperture markings, with the bumpy black plastic focussing ring and light alloy aperture rings (as in the third image above).

The lens on the far right is the 300mm f/4.5 Tele-Megor from Meyer-Optik, who did not follow the Zeiss style conventions.

The 1000mm Zeiss mirror lens almost never followed the Zeiss style used with other lenses. It was generally a pale grey, sometimes with a hint of cream or green. In this image, it has a light shade of blue, which presumably reproduces correctly the colour of the original lens photographed. Only in the very last years was an all-black version available.

Note that at the time that this brochure was prepared, three East German lenses that subsequently became part of the standard offering for the Pentacon Six had not yet started production: the 300mm f/4 Zeiss Sonnar, the 500mm f/5.6 Meyer Orestegor and the 300mm f/4 Meyer Orestegor.

This particular brochure was designed for the United States, where there were at the time court cases, initiated by West German Zeiss, to try to prevent Carl Zeiss Jena from using the Zeiss name and other Zeiss lens names such as “Biometar” and “Sonnar”. It is for this reason that the manufacturer is merely referred to as “Jena”, and the lenses have the names “Bm” and “S”, respectively. “Flektogon” had never been used by West German Zeiss, who used the name “Distagon” for its wide-angle lenses, which is why the Flektogon name does appear in this brochure.

You can read more about these legal desputes, and how they were resolved, here.

Starting in 1976, Carl Zeiss gradually introduced multi-coating for all its lenses. This is easy to identify, as multi-coated lenses are marked “MC”. In the early years of the change, these letters were in red paint, but from about 1980 onwards, the letters “MC” were usually in white paint. If you see two equivalent lenses, but one is single-coated and the other is multi-coated, I would of course recommend the multi-coated lens, which will be newer.

What do multi-coated lenses look like?

Some lens produced in about 1976 were multi-coated, but did not yet have the letters “MC” or the words “MULTI COATING” engraved on the name ring. A visitor to this website has therefore asked me how to identify whether or not a lens is multi-coated. Simply put, if one can hold a lens at such an angle that reflections can be seen on the elements, it is generally possible to be reasonably sure whether or not the lens is multi-coated. In particular, multi-coated lenses general display reflections of various colours. However, some warnings must be given:

• over time, manufacturers sometimes change the details of the multi-coating, which can results in reflections of different colours from those with other lens that may be otherwise identical;
• the colours of the reflections depend on the ambient light
• the colours of the reflections depend on the angle at which the lens is viewed.

With these provisos, I show here a 180mm MC Sonnar that left the production line in December 1983.

Two multi-coated 120mm Biometars can also be seen above (photographed in quite different ambient light from this 180mm Sonnar).

Batches of serial numbers were apparently assigned to the production department in Carl Zeiss, Jena in sequence order. i.e., if the last lens in the previous batch of lenses had the number 8,000,000, the first lens in the next batch would be given the number 8,000,001. However, sometimes the production department did not make the batches in the same order as the serial-number blocks that had been assigned to them. Thus, for example, a batch of 5,000 80mm Biometars was assigned the serial-number block 10,890,988 – 10,895,987 and this batch was finished on 2nd September 1980. The previous block of 5,000 serial numbers (10,885,988 – 10,890,987) had also been assigned to a batch of 80mm Biometars, but this batch was not completed until six months later, on 28th February 1981. However, in spite of details of this nature, serial numbers are a good guide to the age of a lens.

In the example above, I have added commas here, to make the numbers easier to read, but no commas, full stops or spaces were used when the serial number was engraved on the lens, unlike the practice of Schneider-Kreuznach, who put spaces where I have put commas.

By mid 1980, Carl Zeiss had reached the serial number 10,982,372 (nearly 11 million). It then decided to start the serial numbers anew, apparently beginning at 1,0001 (although there are very small numbers of lenses produced in the 1980’s with lower numbers than this). So most lenses made between about mid 1980 and 1991 had four or five-digit serial numbers and are therefore the newest lenses. (You can see from the example given above that some of the lenses with serial numbers in the ten millions were in fact not completed until early in 1981.)