Olympia-Sonnar 180mm f/2.8 (Contarex)

The Olympia-Sonnar 180mm f/2.8 was the fast long lens of the Contarex system, built by Carl Zeiss in Oberkochen. Its name reaches back to the 1936 Olympics: Barringer and Pacific Rim’s Contax page say Zeiss Jena made the first 18 cm f/2.8 Sonnar for the Contax rangefinder in time for the Winter Games at Garmisch, while Pacific Rim’s Contarex page names the Berlin Games. Charles Barringer, writing on the lens’s history in the Zeiss Historica journal in 1989, says the Olympia Sonnar was the only Zeiss lens to keep the same focal length and aperture through every top Zeiss 35mm system, from the prewar and postwar Contax through the Contarex to the Contax RTS. He also says Zeiss “reintroduced it in modified form for the Contarex system”. Pacific Rim Camera likewise calls it “an updated version of the design”. It gives Zeiss’s product code as 11.2425 and the year as 1966.

It is a rare lens. Pacific Rim counts 965 made, all in 1966. Leitz Photographica Auction describes one lot as “made in a batch of only 1000 lenses in 1966”, and every recorded serial number falls between 4327933 and 4328752. Production was a single batch, but the lens was sold for years afterwards. Zeiss Ikon-Voigtländer’s US list of March 1968 prices it at $515 as an “automatic preset” lens, more than a chrome Contarex Super body alone ($445), and the October 1971 list at $666. Leitz’s photographs show no aperture ring: like the other automatic Contarex lenses, it is stopped down from the camera. It does not focus with a helical ring either. A knob on the side of the barrel moves the optics, as on the Olympia-Sonnar 250mm f/4 and the Tele-Tessar 400mm f/5.6 covered on their own pages, and there is a rotating tripod collar at the front. It takes 67mm screw-in filters, a size the 1971 list shares only with the 250mm. Pacific Rim gives 14° for the angle of view and four elements in four groups. No Zeiss data sheet is on record to confirm the construction. If it is right, the Contarex lens is a different computation from Bertele’s five-element, three-group Jena design, which has its own page here (Pacific Rim gives the Contax lens as five elements in three groups). It is also unrelated to the six-element Contax/Yashica Sonnar T* 180mm f/2.8, which Barringer describes as recalculated. Barringer places that lens in the early 1970s; the catalogue’s C/Y page dates its release to 1982.

There is one version: black, knob-focused, under one catalogue number, with no evidence of a chrome lens or a later revision. The main trap for a buyer is the name. Leitz has sold a chrome prewar Olympia-Sonnar with its Flektoskop reflex housing for the Contax as “Carl Zeiss 2.8/180mm Olympia-Sonnar”, almost the same title as its Contarex lots, and Jena 180s in Exakta, M42 and Pentacon Six mounts are far more common. The Contarex lens is the black one with the side knob and no aperture ring; its barrel is engraved simply “Sonnar 1:2,8 f=180mm”, without the word Olympia. Check also for the “grip” that Leitz and Christie’s list as a separate item with several examples (4328249, 4328384 and Christie’s 4328516). Leitz’s photographs of 4328249 show it as a black, textured handle fitted to the front of the barrel. The 1968 list sells the 250mm Olympia-Sonnar “with rapid focusing grip” but says nothing of a grip for the 180. Check that the automatic diaphragm closes briskly when the body’s stop-down mechanism works it. To use the lens on another camera, you need an adapter that supplies aperture control, since the lens has none of its own.

The market is thin, and nearly all the evidence comes from one auction house. Leitz results, which the house states including its buyer’s premium (24% within the EU, 20% for shipment outside it, for the three lots sold under the margin scheme; the 4328384 lot was sold under full taxation, with VAT due on top within the EU), run from €660 for a near-mint 4328752 with front cap only (estimate €800–1,000) to €1,020 for 4328249 with hood, grip and caps, €1,320 for a near-mint 4327933 with rear cap and €1,440 for a black 4328384 with caps, grip and keeper. Each sold below its estimate. No review of the Contarex lens is on record. Closest focus, smallest aperture, weight and dimensions are not recorded in the sources cited here.