Distagon 35mm f/2 (Contarex)

The Distagon 35mm f/2 is the fast wide-angle Carl Zeiss added to the Contarex in 1965. Until then the system’s only 35mm was the Distagon 35mm f/4, one of the lenses shown with the camera at Photokina 1958, and Pacific Rim Camera says the f/2 was offered for photographers who used the 35mm as their standard lens and needed the extra speed. It is a retrofocus design, Zeiss product code 11.2414, and it was made in black only. Pacific Rim, Flashback Camera and Japanese Wikipedia all give 3,150 made between 1965 and 1973, about half the 6,633 Pacific Rim gives for the 35/4 (a figure it also gives for the 25mm). Pacific Rim puts the smaller number down to its being larger, heavier and more expensive. Flashback weighed one at 423 g. It focuses to 22 cm, which Flashback calls very close, and Zeiss Ikon’s 1968 list says the 25mm to 55mm lenses compensate the diaphragm automatically at close range. Like every automatic Contarex lens it has no aperture ring. The aperture is set by the wheel on the camera body.

The construction is disputed. Flashback Camera and Japanese Wikipedia give nine elements in eight groups. Pacific Rim gives ten in nine, and English Wikipedia’s lens table follows Pacific Rim. Neither Zeiss Ikon US list gives a count, so the question stays open. Erwin Puts reproduces sheets drawn by Zeiss’s optical department for the lens, without comment. As far as the small scans can be read, illumination at f/2 falls to roughly 30 per cent at the corner of the frame, while at f/4 and f/8 it stays above 85 per cent out to 15 mm from the centre and ends near two-thirds. Distortion is barrel, reaching a little over one per cent at the corner. The lens takes 56 mm bayonet filters or 49 mm screw-in filters. Its bayonet hood, 20.0710, is the one Zeiss Ikon listed for the 21, 25 and 35mm lenses.

It was one of the dearer lenses in the system. Zeiss Ikon-Voigtländer’s US list of March 1968, the earliest on record that includes it, prices it at $279, against $209 for the B-Distagon 35mm f/4 and $239 for the Planar 55mm f/1.4. On the confidential dealer schedule of February 1971 it is $366 list and $244 dealer net. Neither list has a flash-coupled “B” version of it, as there is of the 35/4 and the Planar 50mm f/2. The serial numbers seen are bunched together. Christie’s Contarex collection held 3692202 and 3694689, and Leitz has sold 3692663, 3692863 and 3693287, dating the first two to 1965. Flashback also dates its lens, 3693648 in its photographs, to 1965. That span is narrower than the 3,150 lenses said to have been made by 1973, and no number from a later block has turned up. At Leitz Photographica Auction, single lenses have made €660 and €840, both hammer prices including buyer’s premium. A lot pairing one with a black Flash Planar 50mm f/2 made €1,020.

The name Distagon 35mm f/2 returned on Zeiss’s ZF and ZE lenses for Nikon and Canon, and later the Milvus. On the MFLenses forum in 2010, posters described that lens as a modification of the Contarex design and its resemblance as “striking”. No Zeiss statement confirms the lineage, and the modern lens is easy to tell apart. The Contax/Yashica line made 35mm Distagons at f/1.4 and f/2.8 but not at f/2, so in a listing a Distagon 1:2/35 with a bright knurled focusing ring, no aperture ring and a Contarex bayonet is this lens. When buying, check the glass first. Flashback’s copy, overhauled in April 2025, still showed faint traces of fungus on the front and rear elements and some coating wear, and Leitz’s descriptions mention a few dust particles in one lens and minimal cleaning marks on another. Then check that the diaphragm snaps open and closed cleanly on a Contarex body or an adapter that drives the lens’s own iris. An adapter with an iris of its own is no substitute. The Contarex Bullseye, Special, Professional, Super and Super Electronic pages cover the bodies it fits.