A Comprehensive Guide to Camera Lens Design and Zeiss Nomenclature

Highly recommended reading if you are interested in different lens designs and especially that Zeiss stuff!

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The German optical systems manufacturer, Carl Zeiss, has had a 168 year legacy in creating some of the world’s best lenses. In 2011, H.H. Nasse wrote a series of technical papers for Carl Zeiss detailing their modern lens history and genealogy. In his three part series, he discussed 5 lens designed that changed the world. They are the Planar, the Tessar, the Biogon, the Distagon, and the Hologon (click on these links to download the original PDF files).

Zeiss Planar 100mm f/2 (left); Zeiss Planar 85mm f/1.4 (center); Zeiss CP.2 25mm f/2.9 Cine Lens (right)

While very detailed and technical, it is not very well written and an incredibly dense read for your average joe. That’s why we have repackaged the information in a more reader friendly format and filled in some holes with our cited research (such as adding the Sonnar lens). That being said, I still recommend you read Nasse’s original papers after you…

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05 Jan This entry was published on January 5, 2015 at 7:53 pm. It’s filed under Quotes & Readings and tagged lens, technical design, Zeiss. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.