Apo-Makro-Planar T* 120mm f/4 (Contax 645)

The Apo-Makro-Planar T* 120mm f/4 was the macro lens of the Contax 645, Kyocera’s autofocus 6×4.5 SLR, and one of the six Carl Zeiss lenses the system was launched with in 1999; Zeiss’s data sheet for it was printed on 9 March 1999. That sheet, catalogue number 10 78 86, gives eight elements in five groups, a focal length of 120.1 mm and a 32° field on the 41.5 × 56 mm frame, f/4 to f/45, a 72 mm filter thread, 86 × 104 mm at infinity and about 796 g. Kyocera’s own table pairs it with a 75 mm lens on 35 mm. It focuses from infinity to life size without tubes or bellows, uses floating elements to hold its correction over that range, and is apochromatically corrected. Zeiss based it on the Planar type, which it notes it had also chosen for the S-Planar lenses used to make microchips, and claimed that at 1:1 it reaches the standard of its S-Planar copy lenses. Zeiss designed it and it was built in Japan: the barrel reads “Lens made in Japan”, and Jason Schneider wrote in 2006 that the 645 lenses were made by Kyocera with Zeiss technicians checking quality on site. German Wikipedia says only that Zeiss supplied the lenses.

It is the one lens in the system without autofocus. Zeiss’s sheet explains that the careful close-up photographer it was made for “would not use the autofocus”, and gives it a precision mechanism for smooth manual focusing instead; Michael Reichmann put the decision down to the very long helicoid that takes it from infinity to 1:1. The whole knurled barrel is the focusing ring, and at 1:1 the lens is about twice its 104 mm length (Shige’s hobby). The extending barrel carries a red reproduction-ratio scale from 1:10 to 1:1 with depth-of-field lines, while the distance scale on the focusing ring stops at 0.55 m. Japanese Wikipedia, citing Genkosha’s プロフェッショナル中判カメラ, gives 0.425 m as the closest focus, as does Shige’s page for the lens; his summary table says 0.3 m. Owners find the focusing heavily damped and slow. Shige calls the ring somewhat heavy, and Guy Harrison, a professional nature photographer who wrote on DPR Forum in 2002 that it was the lens he used most in his Contax kit, called it slow to focus by hand and added that slow, deliberate focusing is the norm in macro work. Manual focus does not make it a mechanical lens. Kyocera’s repair manual says every lens in the series sets its aperture in eighth-stop steps with a stepping motor inside the lens, and that the lens’s own processor reads the aperture ring; the instruction manual adds that in manual-focus mode the camera still lights its in-focus mark.

Kyocera’s Auto Extension Tubes of 13, 26 and 52 mm take it past life size; Shige estimates about 1.43× with the 52 mm tube, at the cost of infinity focus. The Mutar 1.4× does not fit directly: Zeiss’s sheet for the converter restricts it to the Sonnar 140 and 210 and the Tele-Apotessar 350, because its protruding front element would collide with the other lenses. One owner on DPR Forum reported in 2002 that he mounted the Mutar on the body, a 26 mm tube on the Mutar and the 120 on the tube to go beyond 1:1. The hood is the GB-73, a reversible bayonet hood marked ø75mm that the lens shares with the Sonnar 140. This is not the Hasselblad Makro-Planar 120mm f/4, which is six elements in four groups, catalogue number 10 78 36, and reaches only 1:4.5 at 0.8 m without tubes. Marc, posting as fotografz on DPR Forum in 2006, called both excellent; in his experience the Hasselblad lens had a little more flatness of field for copy work, while he credited the Contax lens with very nice pictorial qualities and, as he recalled, excellent bokeh. Unaided life size was not unique to this lens either: American Photo noted in 2000 that most medium-format macro lenses needed tubes or bellows for 1:1, and introduced two Bronica macros that did not.

Reviewers single out its colour correction. Reichmann, who chose the Contax 645 in 2003 partly for its lenses and used this one with a Kodak DCS Pro Back, placed it among a handful of legendary lenses and reported “no colour fringing whatsoever”, together with a resolution, micro-contrast and dimensionality he had rarely seen. Shige, on a Leica S, found it even from centre to edge with chromatic aberration well controlled. The Japanese blogger sstylery, shooting it wide open on a Canon EOS 5D, praised its colour separation and dense tonal gradation and its freedom from fringing even into backlight, but found that, viewed at 100 per cent, it resolves less finely than 35 mm macro lenses at every distance, as he expected of a lens designed for medium-format film. He reads its cross-section as a development of the S-Planar 100mm f/4 bellows lens for the Contax/Yashica mount, a simple symmetrical layout with low-dispersion glass and a floating rearmost element, rather than the layout of the Makro-Planar 100mm f/2.8, and thinks Zeiss chose it to keep a 1:1 medium-format lens light. Leica’s S-Adapter C of June 2013 gives autofocus with every Contax 645 lens except this one; on the Leica S, Shige found that the camera would not release in autofocus mode until the centre point confirmed focus, which makes the body’s manual-focus mode the practical setting. With Leica’s own Apo-Macro-Summarit-S 120mm stopping at 1:2, he counts it among the most practical ways to reach 1:1 on that system. Fringer’s GFX adapter also lists it as manual focus only, and sstylery points out that on a plain adapter without contacts the diaphragm stays wide open.

Camera World in Portland listed it at $2,395 in May 2000 as the “M-APO-MAKRO-PLANAR”, level with the Distagon 35mm as the dearest of the six launch lenses, and Shige gives ¥270,000 before tax as the Japanese list price. A DPR Forum member paid $1,450 to a Hong Kong dealer on eBay in 2002, and another saw eBay prices rise from $1,500 to $2,000 by early 2007. In 2017 sstylery found used prices low and stable and suspected the electromagnetic diaphragm was why. On Yahoo! Auctions between May and October 2026, single-lens lots sold for between ¥53,505 and ¥147,522 including tax, and a boxed copy in like-new condition that GearFocus listed in September 2025 sold for $1,121.99. There is one version, and every serial seen is a seven-digit number beginning 879; no production figure or serial table has been published.

When buying, check on a working Contax 645 body or an electronic adapter that the diaphragm stops down, since only the lens’s own motor moves it, and turn the focusing ring through its whole travel to 1:1, because the long helicoid carries the whole front of the lens out and back. Trust the lens rather than the box or the listing text. One Yahoo! seller in July 2026 titled this lens “ZV Classic 120”: the photographs show a Contax 645 Apo-Makro-Planar, serial 8797676, packed in the box, case and certificate of a Zeiss Makro-Planar T* 4/120 ZV Classic limited edition, the shutterless Hasselblad-mount lens made in Oberkochen. GearFocus’s description of its copy gave the lens a 1:2 ratio. A Yahoo! seller in October 2026 supplied the Sonnar 210’s GB-74 hood with one; the seller described it as a 75 mm hood, and Shige says both fit the system’s 72 mm-filter lenses. Kyocera stopped taking Contax repairs on 30 April 2015 and refers owners of Contax film cameras to Repair Service Suwa in Japan.