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Tessar and Planar Lenses By Marc James Small
The great Paul Rudolph designed the six-element symmetrical Planar in the early 1890's while at Carl Zeiss Jena. This lens was a stunningly fine performer but suffered badly
from ghosting and flare due to the large number of air-to-glass surfaces. Thus, the
design was never used widely, and Rudolph spent the next six years dedicating himself — and his young assistant, Dr Ernst Wandersleb, the future head of Optical Design at
Jena — to the production of a lens which provided the same level of performance while
not being as subject to flare. Thus was born the Tessar in 1902.
Zeiss held the patent on the Tessar design for some two decades, during which time
they licensed the design to Bausch & Lomb in the United States and to Krauss in France. Within Germany, they licensed it widely, though they jealously guarded the name and
required licensees to use the older Zeiss trademark of ‘Anastigmat' for their versions, as Bausch & Lomb did when they further licensed the Tessar design to Kodak at the time of the First World War.
When originally designed, the Tessar was a rather slow lens at f/6.3 but solid
development work by Rudolph had opened this to f/4.5 by 1917, and a comprehensive
reworking by Wandersleb and Merte in 1930 allowed the lens to be produced in an f/2.8 version. By the 1930's, the 3.5/7.5cm Tessar was a standard for medium-format
photography. The lens was reworked again in the 1940's to produce the Postwar 3.5/75 Tessar as produced by Carl Zeiss at Oberkochen and used on the last of the Automat
Rolleiflex cameras and on the Rolleiflex T models.
Meanwhile, the Planar languished, though many optical scientists struggled to improve
its performance under backlit conditions, and this work, especially that of Tronnier at
Schneider and Berek at Leitz led to the Summar, Xenon, Summitar, and, eventually, the
Summicron, Summilux and Noctilux designs. When Alexander Smakula perfected the
technique of vacuum-coating fluoride compounds in 1935 while at Zeiss, Wandersleb
decided to revisit the Planar to see if its performance could be improved by the use of
lens coatings. This, in turn, led to an extensive redesign by Sauer which produced,
shortly after the end of the Second War, the five-element Planar as used extensively in
the later Rolleiflex TLR's.
The East German Carl Zeiss Jena works had inherited most of the preliminary work done on this redesign and actually had a five-element design on the market a year or two
before the West German Carl Zeiss works at Oberkochen produced the Planar. As Jena
had lost the right to the Zeiss trademarks, their lens was denoted as the ‘Biometar' but
this is functionally identical to the West German Planar. And when the 3.5/75 Planar was found to suffer from edge definition and fall-off problems, a weak sixth element was
added in the 1960's for the final runs of the Rolleiflex 3.5's.
Further information can be found in Prochnow's fine Rollei Reports and in Kingslake's A
History of the Photographic Lens. And please feel free to contact to discuss these lenses further — I'm always delighted to exchange experiences and history!
Marc
msmall@roanoke.infi.net FAX: +540/343-7315 Cha robh bas fir gun ghras fir!
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The Zeiss Tessar lens
See note on soft Tessars on Rolleiflex 2.8A
The Xenar lens
The Xenar lens from Schneider has practcally the same performance as the Tessar.
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The Zeiss Planar / Schneider Xenotar lens
The Planar for Rolleiflex had in the beginning 5 elements.
This is the Planar lens used in Hasselblad.
The Xenotar lens
The Xenotar lens from Schneider has practcally the same performance as the Planar.
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The Zeiss Triotar
A cheaper three element lens used in early Rolleicords (before 1949).
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source: http://foto.no/rolleiflex/Rollei-9.html |
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| 노현석 |
아마도 practally라고 작성된 것은 i가 빠진 것같습니다. 예나가 테사와 실재적으로는 동일한 성능을 낸다, 제노타가 플라나와 실재적으로는 동일한 성능을 낸다고 기술되어 있네요.
실재로 그러한지는 잘 모르겠습니다. 예나와 플라나가 오히려 개인적으로 비슷했는데요. |
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2007/05/31 |
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Rolleiflex Taking Lenses
Hasselblad, 007 시리즈 "License to Kill" (1989)
..1 
