Glass Bodies a variant-level encyclopedia of vintage lenses and cameras by iwillpat

Biotar 7.5cm f/1.5

Carl Zeiss Jena · Contax RF + M42 + Exakta · 1939

single source, unconfirmed our own finding

Known as “King of Bokeh”

Also known as: Zeiss Biotar 75mm f/1.5 · Carl Zeiss Jena Biotar 75mm f/1.5 · Biotar 75mm f1.5 · Biotar 75mm · Biotar 7.5cm f1.5 · Biotar 1.5/75 · Biotar 1.5/75mm · Biotar 1,5/7,5cm · Biotar 1:1,5 f=7,5cm · Biotar 1.5/75 M42 · Biotar 1,5/75 · Biotar 1,5/75 Exakta · Biotar 75 1.5 Exa · ビオター 75mm F1.5

Variants & identification

Variant Mount Years Serial ranges Production
Exakta, prewar (1939–1945), uncoated Exakta 1939–1945 from 2529100 — the opening Exakta number in Morrison's mount table, 1939; camera-wiki's 1939 band runs 2,527,999–2,651,211 —
Exakta, postwar slim barrel (1946–c.1953), T-coated, manual iris Exakta 1946–1953 323xxxx — Flashback's aluminium lens, which the dealer thinks was sold as a set with an Exakta in New York; see the serial notes on the date Flashback gives it —
Exakta, fat preset barrel (c.1952–1969) Exakta 1952–1969 422xxxx — Flashback, dated 1954
482xxxx — Flashback, dated 1956
6243247 — offered on Kleinanzeigen, October 2026, as 'EXA'
6794294 — Kamerastore T108337 		—
Prewar, chrome over brass Contax RF 1940–1940 2759801–2759900 — one batch, 1940, on Pacific Rim Camera's account; the block falls in camera-wiki's 1941 band About 100 (Pacific Rim Camera, the only source to record a prewar Contax batch — see the table notes)
Postwar Jena, first batch (December 1950) Contax RF 1950–1950 from 3467751 — the opening number of the Contax rangefinder production (The Lens DB; Cheyenne Morrison's mount table). Leitz Auction's no. 3467776 sits 25 numbers in 100 (The Lens DB; Thiele's factory books are the likely origin)
Postwar Jena, second batch (1954) Contax RF 1954–1954 3945251 — a lens in original Contax mount that Thiele's catalogue dates to 1954, reported by Roland Bischoff in the comments on Casual Photophile; the batch's opening number is not published 125 (The Lens DB; Thiele's factory books are the likely origin)
M42, slim barrel (1949–c.1953), for the Contax S M42 1949–1953 — —
M42, fat preset barrel (c.1952 into the 1960s) M42 1952 5893031 — Kamerastore T151919
6243399 — Kamerastore T152343 		—
Praktina, fat preset barrel (from 1953) Praktina bayonet 1953 5598497 — Kamerastore T138149 About 1,250 from 1953 (Morrison)
  1. The postwar count. The Lens DB gives 225 lenses for the Contax rangefinder, 100 in December 1950 and 125 in 1954; Cheyenne Morrison's mount table on Casual Photophile gives the same 225 from no. 3,467,751 in 1950. Neither names its source, and both almost certainly rest on Hartmut Thiele's transcription of the Jena factory books, which is what Roland Bischoff dates individual lenses from in the same article's comments — two publications, then, but not two independent counts. Leitz Auction's catalogue rounds it to "only around 200 produced".
  2. A different count exists and is not small. On Rangefinderforum on 23 March 2010, dexdog wrote that John Keesing's Contax Rangefinder Lenses 1932–1962 puts the number made at about 800. Whether Keesing's 800 counts the prewar batch, the remounts, or something else, the post does not say. The 225 is the figure with a factory-book pedigree; the 800 is recorded so a reader who meets it knows where it comes from.
  3. The prewar batch rests on Pacific Rim Camera alone: "one batch of about 100 examples was produced, serial numbers 2759801 to 2759900", in 1940, six elements in four groups, in a heavy chrome-over-brass barrel. Neither camera-wiki nor English Wikipedia lists a Biotar 75 among the prewar Contax lenses — both place it only among the postwar Jena alloy lenses — and Morrison's mount table has no prewar Contax row. Pacific Rim Camera is the source that prints batch numbers for the other Contax lenses on this site, so the batch is carried as a variant, but it is a single-source claim and the badge applies.
  4. Production by mount. On zeissikonveb.de, Marco Kröger dates the design to 20 April 1938 and production to February 1939, for Ihagee's Kine Exakta, and says the optical calculation of that date was never revised until the lens was dropped in 1969; he counts "knapp 20.000" lenses over thirty years, in lots of 100, 150, 200 or at most 300, usually one lot per mount per year, which is why the lens was hard to get even when it was current. Morrison counts 16,827 from 1939 to 1967 in three versions and six mounts, and tabulates them: Exakta 10,300 from no. 2,529,100 (1939), Contax S/M42 4,600 (1949), Praktica 450 (1953), Praktina 1,250 (1953), Contax rangefinder 225 (1950), Leica thread 3 (1950). Those six add to 16,828, one more than her total. Stephen Gandy puts about 80% of the 75 Biotars he has seen in Exakta mount. No source divides the Exakta or M42 figures between the slim and the preset barrels.
  5. The end date. Kröger has the lens dropped in 1969, Morrison has production ceasing in 1967. Kröger adds that most lenses of the second half of the 1960s went out not as camera lenses but in a cine focusing mount (Kinoeinstellfassung) or a mount for industrial television, by which time the preset lens was outdated as a still lens, and that the 1970 catalogue's remaining Exakta lenses may have been the rare ones with a black barrel. No cine, television or black-barrelled example has turned up, so none is a variant here.
  6. The barrels. Morrison's three versions are the prewar "thin" lens of 1939–45 (380 g, 18 blades, f/22, minimum focus 0.9 m, numbers in the 2,000,000s), the postwar "slim" lens of 1946–52 (chromed steel, T-coated, 18 blades, 500 g, numbers 3,100,000–3,777,000) and the "fat" preset lens of 1952–67 (10 or 12 blades, 500 g, numbers 3,777,000–8,275,578). Flashback describes most of its postwar slim lenses as aluminium and two of 1949 as brass, one "with chrome finish" — none as steel — and dates slim lenses in Exakta and M42 to about 1953, after Morrison's switch. Kröger has coating added after 1945; Crafting Pixels, without a source, has red-T coating beginning during the war and the fat barrel running to 1968. Bischoff's 1954 Contax-mount lens no. 3945251 is a slim barrel with 18 blades and f/22, well above 3,777,000: the Contax lens kept the earlier barrel after the SLR lenses had moved to the fat one, and Morrison's serial boundaries are looser than they read.
  7. Sellers number the versions their own way. One Yahoo! Auctions seller calls an M42 lens the third generation (３代目), another lists one as "V2 for M42", and neither title says which barrel it means. Morrison's three versions — the prewar lens, the slim postwar lens and the fat preset — are numbered one to three the same way by Crafting Pixels, but nothing says the sellers count as they do.
  8. A Leica-thread version existed and is rarer still. Kröger has a few single examples fitted with rangefinder coupling in summer 1948 and cannot say why so few; Morrison's table has 3 in 1950 and lists nos. 3467786 and 3320814 (her third number repeats the first); Marc James Small's Non-Leitz Leica Thread-Mount Lenses (Wittig, 1997) knew of two, as JB-Dancer cited it on Rangefinderforum on 14 June 2018, and a commenter on Morrison's article says he found the third, in a junk box in Omaha for $20. It is not a variant here because the numbers do not cohere — 3467786 sits inside the 1950 Contax batch, 3320814 in the 1949–52 M42 run — and because a Biotar 75 in 39mm thread is far more likely a later conversion; retinax's advice in the same thread is to check first whether the thread is Leica's or the Zenit SLR's, which is the same 39mm at a different register.
  9. Weight, filter and focus. Gandy gives 19 oz "even with the aluminum barrel" and a 58mm filter, with the focusing scale in metres and feet; Morrison gives 500 g for the slim and fat barrels and 380 g for the prewar one, and weighed her own fat lens at 450 g. 19 oz is 540 g. The spec table carries 500 for the postwar lenses. Measured SLR lenses spread around it: Flashback's slim aluminium lenses weighed 396–403 g, the Phoblographer's Exakta lens "close to 16oz (roughly 450g)", and Kamerastore lists its preset Exakta and Praktina lenses at 530 g. The prewar chrome lens will weigh what its chrome-over-brass barrel makes it, and no figure for it has been found. Gandy also reports that all the 1950s Jena 75 Biotars were coated and in aluminium rather than chrome barrels, which covers both postwar Contax batches. The 1.1 m in the spec table is the Contax lens, from The Lens DB, whose external-bayonet helicoid sets its own near limit; the slim SLR lenses focus to 1 m (Flashback; The Lens DB for the Leica-thread lens) and the fat preset lenses to 0.8 m (Flashback, Kamerastore), against Morrison's 0.8–0.9 m.
  10. No finder was made for it. Seller listings on eBay Germany offer a "Zeiss Ikon 75mm Sucher 423 für Biotar 7,5cm Contax RF", but Pacific Rim Camera is explicit that although Zeiss offered finders for a 75mm lens, "these were not designed for the Biotar. They are for the 75mm Pantar when used on the Contina III." A 423 finder frames the focal length and nothing more.
  11. What the lens cost. The East German price list compiled by Kröger gives the preset lens at 472 Mark in 1957, 463 Mark in 1959 and 395 Mark from June 1960, and his Biotar page adds "apparently" 527 Mark before the first big price cut, in the fourth quarter of 1953, and the same 395 Mark in the last catalogue of 1970, for remaining Exakta stock. The list does not separate the mounts. Morrison gives $450 in the United States in 1952–53 for the fat version, with a deposit and a wait of months. Crafting Pixels, citing nothing, gives about US$216 in the United States in the early 1950s and DM 596 in Germany in 1953 — less than half Morrison's dollar figure. No period advertisement for either has been found, and no Contax-mount price.
  12. Lenses that borrow the name. Meyer-Optik Görlitz's "75mm f1.5 Biotar II" is a modern lens for mirrorless mounts — Kamerastore's, for Sony FE, has 15 blades, focuses to 0.75 m and weighs 649 g — and a TTArtisans 75mm f/1.5 has been offered in M42 with "Zeiss Biotar" in the listing title; neither is a Jena lens. The Phoblographer's 2017 review of the old lens was written on the occasion of Oprema's announced revival of the 75 Biotar.
How to tell them apart (expand)
  • The mount is the first thing to read: Exakta bayonet, 42 mm thread, the Praktina's breech-lock bayonet, or the Contax rangefinder's external bayonet. On the Contax it mounts on the EXTERNAL bayonet with its own focusing ring, like the 8.5cm Sonnar — and unlike every 50mm, which the body's wheel focuses
  • Two barrels. The slim one has a plain aperture ring, 18 blades and f/22, and a 1 m near limit on the reflex lenses; it was made for the reflexes to about 1953 and for the 1954 Contax batch. The fat one has a second knurled ring, the preset, ahead of the aperture ring, a castellated grip, an aperture scale ending at 16 and a 0.8 m near limit, and 10 blades on every example described (Morrison: 10 or 12)
  • Contax mount: chrome over brass and uncoated is the 1940 batch; aluminium with a red T is 1950 or 1954. There is no chrome postwar Contax lens and no aluminium prewar one, and a fat preset barrel in Contax mount is an SLR lens remounted
  • Engraved Carl Zeiss Jena, not Zeiss-Opton or Carl Zeiss alone — Oberkochen never made this lens, though it remounted some
  • Small air bubbles inside the elements are normal: Flashback calls them typical of Biotars and of their manufacture, and Kamerastore notes them on three of its four lenses as not affecting the image

Exakta, prewar (1939–1945), uncoated:

  • Exakta bayonet; slim brass barrel, uncoated (no T) — Flashback's description of the late-1930s lens — with the distance scale in metres only on its lenses of about 1939 and of 1940
  • Manual iris with 18 blades; Flashback gives 1 m closest focus for its 1940 lens, Morrison 0.9 m, f/22 and about 380 g for her prewar 'thin' version

Exakta, postwar slim barrel (1946–c.1953), T-coated, manual iris:

  • Exakta bayonet; the slim barrel with a plain aperture ring and no preset ring, aperture scale to 22; T coating
  • Aluminium as a rule — Flashback's no. 323xxxx and its lens of about 1953 are aluminium — but Flashback says a small number were made in chrome-plated brass in the same years, and calls its Exakta lens of about 1949 a 'very rare brass barrel with chrome finish, not aluminium'
  • Engraved in centimetres, Biotar 1:1,5 f=7,5cm with a red T, on Flashback's lenses of about 1949, and in millimetres, Biotar 1,5/75, on its lens of about 1953 (dealer photographs); Crafting Pixels puts the change at about 1950
  • Flashback's no. 323xxxx: aluminium, 18 blades, manual iris, closest focus 3.5 ft (1 m), feet scale, 403 g

Exakta, fat preset barrel (c.1952–1969):

  • Exakta bayonet; the thick 'fat' barrel, with a knurled preset ring ahead of the aperture ring and a broad castellated focusing grip; aperture scale 1,5 to 16
  • 10 blades and 0.8 m closest focus, distance scales in metres and feet (Flashback's 422xxxx and 482xxxx; Kamerastore). Kamerastore gives 530 g and 80 × 79 mm
  • 58 mm filter thread: Flashback's 422xxxx was sold with a Kenko 58 mm filter

Prewar, chrome over brass:

  • Heavy chrome-over-brass barrel, uncoated, engraved 7,5cm — the only Contax-mount Biotar 75 that is not aluminium

Postwar Jena, first batch (December 1950):

  • Aluminium barrel, T-coated, red T, engraved Carl Zeiss Jena; the slim barrel with 18 aperture blades, not the fat preset barrel of the SLR lenses
  • Mounts on the EXTERNAL bayonet with its own focusing helicoid, and couples to the rangefinder

Postwar Jena, second batch (1954):

  • Still the slim barrel, 18 blades and f/22, on the one 1954 example described — built alongside the fat SLR barrel, not after it

M42, slim barrel (1949–c.1953), for the Contax S:

  • 42 mm screw thread with a conical rim behind it (Kröger); slim barrel, plain aperture ring, T coating, 1 m closest focus
  • Engraved Biotar 1:1,5 f=7,5cm with a red T on the lens photographed on a Contax D (Wikimedia Commons, below)
  • Flashback weighed aluminium lenses at 399 g (about 1949, metre scale) and 396 g (about 1953, feet scale), and describes another of 1949 as brass

M42, fat preset barrel (c.1952 into the 1960s):

  • 42 mm thread; the fat preset barrel with the castellated grip, aperture scale 1,5 to 16, distance scales in feet and metres
  • Flashback's lens of about 1953: aluminium, T coating, preset, dual scale, 0.8 m
  • Kamerastore's spec lines for its two M42 lenses (18 blades, 398 g, 67 × 64 mm, 'the non-coated version') do not match the preset barrels in its photographs or its own Exakta and Praktina preset lenses (10 blades, 530 g); the blade count and weight are the slim barrel's

Praktina, fat preset barrel (from 1953):

  • The Praktina's breech-lock bayonet at the rear in place of a thread or Exakta tabs; otherwise the fat preset barrel, its front ring engraved Biotar 1,5/75, the number and Carl Zeiss Jena
  • Kamerastore: 10 blades, 0.8 m, 76 × 65 mm, 530 g

Serial-range notes

the whole number
How to date one. Carl Zeiss drew every photographic lens number from a single running sequence covering all models at once, so a Zeiss lens is dated by reading its number off a serial/year table rather than by counting within its own type — there is no per-model list of the Leitz kind. camera-wiki's table, taken from Wilkinson and Glanfield's A Lens Collector's Vade Mecum, gives the prewar and postwar Jena bands, and Craig Camera publishes a near-identical list.
2529100
The first Exakta lens in Morrison's mount table, 1939. It sits at the bottom of camera-wiki's 1939 band (2,527,999–2,651,211), which agrees with Kröger's February 1939 start.
2678326–2790346
camera-wiki's 1941 band, which is where Pacific Rim Camera's prewar Contax batch of 2759801–2759900 falls. Pacific Rim Camera dates the batch 1940. The bands overlap at their ends (see below), so both can be true; a chrome Contax Biotar 75 is a 1940–41 lens either way.
3000000–5000000
The postwar Jena bands that bracket the aluminium lenses, from camera-wiki: 3,000,000–3,200,000 = 1945–49; 3,200,000–3,470,000 = 1949–52; 3,470,000–4,000,000 = 1952–55; 4,000,000–5,000,000 = 1955–58. Carl Zeiss Jena in the East carried the prewar numbers on from 3,000,000; Carl Zeiss Oberkochen in the West began again at 10,000 in 1946 and passed 1,000,000 about 1953, so a six-figure Zeiss number is an Oberkochen lens of 1946–53 and never one of these.
323xxxx
Flashback's slim aluminium Exakta lens, which the dealer says was shipped in November 1941. The number is in camera-wiki's 1949–52 band, far above the 1941 band, which ends at 2,790,346, and the lens is T-coated, which Kröger dates to after 1945 for this Biotar (Crafting Pixels, without a source, has red-T coating beginning during the war). This page reads it as a lens of about 1949–50 on its number and leaves the 1941 date unexplained.
5000000–9000000
The later Jena bands, from camera-wiki: 5,000,000–6,000,000 = 1958–61; 6,000,000–7,000,000 = 1961–64; 7,000,000–8,000,000 = 1964–67; 8,000,000–9,000,000 = 1967–70. The numbered preset lenses on the 2025–26 market that this page cites run from 5,598,497 to 6,794,294, and the top of Morrison's fat-barrel range, 8,275,578, falls in the last band before the lens was dropped.
6243247 and 6243399
Two lenses 152 numbers apart, one offered as an Exakta lens on Kleinanzeigen and one as an M42 lens by Kamerastore, both in 2026. Kröger says production usually ran to one lot per mount per year, yet these sit close enough to be one lot, so either a lot was split between mounts or one of the two has been converted. Either way, the number does not tell the mount.
3467751–3467850
The first postwar batch, if it was numbered in one run of 100 from the opening number that The Lens DB and Morrison give. Two lenses are known inside it: Leitz Auction's Contax-mount no. 3467776, and no. 3467786, which Morrison lists as one of the three Leica-thread lenses. The block sits at the very top of camera-wiki's 1949–52 band, three digits short of the 3,470,000 boundary, which is consistent with a December 1950 batch allotted late in that block. The closing number is this page's arithmetic, not a published figure.
3170182
A Contax-mount lens numbered well BELOW the 1950 opening. Leitz Auction 10 offered no. 3170182 as lot 493, dated 1949 from its number, "in top condition, very rare with the original Contax mount, very early — possibly a lens for testing purposes"; it sold for €2,640 with premium against an estimate of €3,000–4,000. A number in the 1945–49 band predates both of Thiele's batches, which is why the auction house reads it as a test lens rather than a production one. It is the only such example found.
any Contax-mount lens whose number falls in an M42 block
Not necessarily a fake. Roland Bischoff, commenting on Casual Photophile on 4 August 2021, reports that several 1.5/75 Biotars in Contax RF mount have surfaced that were originally built in M42, and that inquiries at Zeiss and with Thiele personally confirmed a number of M42 lenses made in Jena were remounted to Contax RF at Oberkochen — technically possible only from the M42 mount. How many, and when, is not recorded; the comment is the single source for it. Such a lens is a factory remount, and its number will date it to its M42 batch rather than to either Contax batch.
any number near a year boundary
Blocks were allotted to production in sequence, but batches were not always finished in block order, so the published year bands overlap and a serial places a lens within a year or two rather than to a month. Pentacon Six sets out the mechanism and points to Hartmut Thiele's Fabrikationsbuch Photooptik, a transcription of the factory books, for batch-level dates — the book behind the 100 and 125 above, and the one Bischoff dates his examples from.
a letter followed by five digits
Not a lens number at all. That is the Zeiss Ikon CAMERA sequence, inherited from ICA in 1909, which rolls to the next letter at 99,999. A Contax body number and a Zeiss lens number belong to separate schemes and must never be read against the same table.

Specifications

Formula
Biotar — a six-element double Gauss, the design the Sonnars were built to beat
Designed by
Willy Merté — optical design, completed 20 April 1938
Construction
6 elements / 4 groups
Aperture range
f/1.5
Min. focus
1.1 m
Weight
500 g
Filter
58 mm
Years manufactured
1939–1969
Country
Germany
Original price
East German list price for the preset lens: 472 Mark (1957); apparently 527 Mark before the price cut of late 1953, 463 Mark in 1959, 395 Mark from June 1960, and 395 Mark again in the last catalogue of 1970 for remaining Exakta lenses (Kröger)

What reviewers say

History

The 7.5cm f/1.5 Biotar is a reflex lens that spent a few years as a Contax rangefinder lens. Willy Merté finished the design on 20 April 1938 and Zeiss put it into production in February 1939 for the Kine Exakta, the first 35mm single-lens reflex. Marco Kröger shows why the focal length could hardly be shorter: the optics are almost 72 mm long, about half of that lies behind the rear principal plane, and the Exakta’s mirror needs some 38 mm of clearance behind the last element, which together come to 75 mm. Jena made it to that one calculation, adjusted only to the glass melts at hand, until it was dropped in 1969 (Cheyenne Morrison says 1967). Coating came after 1945 and a preset diaphragm in the 1950s; the optics stayed as calculated. It was the fastest portrait lens made until Leitz answered it with the Summarex in 1943, for decades the standard lens of stage photography in Kröger’s account, and the lens Morrison calls the original King of Bokeh.

It was always scarce. Kröger counts nearly 20,000 in thirty years, built in lots of 100 to 300, usually one lot per mount per year, because large pieces of flawless special glass were hard to come by. Morrison’s table, about 16,800 lenses, puts 10,300 in Exakta mount and 4,600 in M42 for the Contax S, and shares the rest between the Praktina, the Praktica, the Contax rangefinder and Leica thread.

The reflex versions divide by barrel. Before the war it was an Exakta lens in a slim, uncoated brass barrel. After the war the same slim barrel came back T-coated for the Exakta and, from 1949, for the 42mm thread of the Dresden Contax S, which Kröger describes as “for Spiegelcontax and Praktica”. It was aluminium as a rule, though Flashback has handled chrome-finished brass ones of about 1949. These lenses have a plain aperture ring, 18 blades and a 1 m near limit; the lens on a Contax D in the photograph here is one, engraved in centimetres, where a slim lens of about 1953 reads Biotar 1,5/75. From about 1952–53 Jena put the lens into a much fatter barrel with a preset ring, a castellated grip and an aperture scale stopping at 16, focusing to 0.8 m; every one described has 10 blades, though Morrison allows 10 or 12. That barrel went to the Exakta, the M42 thread and the Praktina’s bayonet, and it is the version most often seen; Kröger pictures one on a Contax E. The lens kept its preset to the end, and by the late 1960s Kröger thinks it outdated as a camera lens: most of the last ones went out in cine focusing mounts or mounts for industrial television, and the 1970 catalogue still offered remaining Exakta lenses at 395 Mark.

The Contax rangefinder got it twice, and in tiny numbers both times. Pacific Rim Camera records a single prewar batch of about 100 in 1940, nos. 2759801–2759900, in a heavy chrome-over-brass barrel — a batch no other source mentions, which is why it carries the single-source badge. Then, after the war, the factory books as reported by The Lens DB give 225 lenses in Contax bayonet: 100 in December 1950 and 125 in 1954. Those are postwar East German lenses through and through, aluminium barrel, red T, Carl Zeiss Jena engraving — and, on the one 1954 example described, still the slim 18-blade barrel after the SLR lenses had moved to the fat preset one. Being a long lens it goes on the external bayonet with its own focusing helicoid, like the 8.5cm Sonnar, and couples to the rangefinder.

Two things complicate the postwar Contax count. Leitz Auction has sold a Contax-mount lens numbered 3,170,182, which the Jena serial table puts in 1949, a year before the first batch; the auction house calls it “possibly a lens for testing purposes”, and this page reads it the same way. And Roland Bischoff, in the comments on Morrison’s article, reports on inquiry at Zeiss and with Thiele himself that some M42 lenses built in Jena were later remounted to Contax RF at Oberkochen in the West. A Contax Biotar 75 whose number falls in an M42 block is therefore a factory remount rather than a fake, and there are more genuine Contax-mount lenses in the world than the 225 the books record. How many more, nobody has said; John Keesing’s estimate of about 800, cited second-hand on Rangefinderforum, may be counting some of them.

Why so few for the Contax? Pacific Rim Camera’s answer is political: by the time the postwar lens was ready, Jena in the East found it hard to sell lenses to Zeiss Ikon and Zeiss Ikon in the West found it hard to buy them, so the lens went where the East German cameras were, into Exakta and M42 mounts. The camera the lens was designed for had also won. The Contax S of 1949 took the lens in its M42 thread, and the rangefinder Contax was by then the IIa and IIIa, built at Stuttgart while the lens was built at Jena. Two batches, four years apart, and then nothing.

When buying, read the mount before the barrel, because the number will not tell it: an Exakta lens and an M42 lens offered in 2026 are only 152 numbers apart. Early M42 lenses have a conical rim behind the thread that was meant to ease mounting. From the Praktica FX2 of 1956 it fouls the pressure-pin linkage in the mirror box, and the Praktica L series of 1969 has no way to switch that off, so the lens jams those bodies; many have had the rim cut down or notched, which some digital adapters also need. Small bubbles in the glass are normal. Two of the lenses offered in 2026 had oil on the blades, Flashback mentions a stiffness it calls typical of Biotars, and on a preset lens the preset ring should stop the iris where it is set. Check dealer specifications against the photographs: Kamerastore lists its two M42 preset lenses with 18 blades, 398 g and “the non-coated version”, where its Exakta and Praktina lenses in the same fat barrel have 10 blades and weigh 530 g, and no Jena lens of 1958–64 was uncoated. A fat preset barrel in Contax mount is a remounted SLR lens, a Biotar 75 in 39mm thread is more likely a conversion than one of Jena’s few, and the modern Meyer-Optik Görlitz “Biotar II” and the TTArtisans 75mm f/1.5 turn up under the same name.

Expand Collapse

This history is AI-written, from the sources listed at the foot of the page. Where the record is silent it says so rather than filling the gap — but no human wrote these sentences.

Example photos

Sample photo taken with the Biotar 7.5cm f/1.5
A slim-barrel M42 Biotar, engraved Biotar 1:1,5 f=7,5cm with a red T, on a Zeiss Ikon Contax D — Stephan Koelliker, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Sample photo wanted — shot with a Biotar 7.5cm f/1.5? We'd love to feature it (with credit).

Live listings

Asking price, EUR: a median of €3,400 across 3 fixed-price listings on 2026-11-02 (middle half €1,600–€3,400). Tracked since 2026-10-30, 2 days: unchanged from €3,400.

By day
DateMedianMiddle halfListings
2026-11-02€3,400€1,600–€3,4003
2026-10-30€3,400€1,600–€3,4003

Asking prices from the listings scanned, not sales; junk-flagged rows and auction lots excluded; other currencies are not converted.

Buying from Yahoo! Auctions outside Japan. It is a domestic marketplace: sellers ship within Japan, and most will not register an overseas buyer. A proxy service bids on your behalf, receives the item and forwards it, for a fee and a wait. Buyee, Jauce and ZenMarket each accept a Yahoo auction number directly. Listed alphabetically for information — none is recommended over another, and none of these is an affiliate link.

Listings updated 2026-11-02. Links go to the shop or marketplace that carries the item.

Related: Biotar 4cm f/2 · Sonnar 8.5cm f/2 · Summarex 8.5cm f/1.5 · Biotar 58mm f/2 · Biometar 80mm f/2.8 (35mm SLR, 1948 design)

Sources (24)

Every page here is assembled from public sources, and the gaps are real ones. If you own this lens, know a serial number I'm missing, or can see where I have it wrong, tell me — corrections, serials and sample photos are all worth having.