Distagon T* 35mm f/3.5 (Contax 645)

The Distagon T* 3,5/35 was the widest lens Carl Zeiss designed for Kyocera’s Contax 645, the autofocus 6×4.5 SLR of 1999, and one of the six lenses the system was launched with; the camera’s manual pairs it with a 21 mm lens on 35 mm film. Zeiss’s data sheet, printed on 9 March 1999, gives catalogue number 10 49 43, eleven elements in eight groups, a true focal length of 35.5 mm and 90° across the 41.5 × 56 mm frame, f/3.5 to f/32, internal focusing to 0.5 m, an M95 × 1 filter thread, 102 mm across the flared front and 108 mm in length, and about 877 g. Zeiss aimed it at landscapes, cities, interiors, advertising and industrial work, called its f/3.5 “second to no other super wide angle lens in medium format”, and described its illumination as very uniform and its distortion as well controlled. The curves on the same sheet are more measured: barrel distortion reaching a little over 2% of image height about 27 mm from the centre, and at f/3.5 the extreme corner of the 645 frame receiving roughly a quarter of the light at the centre, and just over half at f/8.

Like every lens of the system it is an electronic lens with no mechanical link to the body. Kyocera’s repair manual puts a focus motor, a stepping motor that sets the diaphragm in eighth-stop steps, and a lens CPU inside the lens; the CPU reads the aperture ring as a coded dial and keeps the lens’s data and correction values in its own memory. The focusing ring can be turned at any moment to take over from the autofocus. Zeiss calls the focusing internal, Shige reports from the maker’s description that a small rear group moves, and the filter thread does not turn, which suits a polariser on the 95 mm front. Whether the focus motor is ultrasonic is not settled: Outdoor Photographer’s preview of December 1998 spoke of six ultrasonic autofocus lenses and Japanese Wikipedia gives one to every lens but the manual-focus 120, while Kyocera’s American releases name it only for the 350mm. The barrel reads “Lens made in Japan”. Jason Schneider reported the system’s lenses as designed by Zeiss in Germany and made by Kyocera in Japan under the eye of Zeiss technicians on site; German Wikipedia says instead that Zeiss supplied them.

There is one version, made from 1999 until Contax 645 production ended in April 2005. It was expensive: Camera World of Portland advertised it in May 2000 as the “M Distagon 35mm f/3.5” at $2,395, level with the Apo-Makro-Planar 120 as the dearest of the six Contax 645 lenses in the list, above the $2,249 Distagon 45 and well above the $1,565 Planar 80, and Shige’s lens table gives ¥287,000 before tax in Japan, though no Kyocera price list has been found to confirm it. Used, it now sells for a fraction of that. Shige finds it relatively easy to find, from about ¥80,000 in 2023. Copies offered on Yahoo! Auctions in 2026 as working or in fine condition went for ¥74,800 to ¥115,000, with ¥110,658 paid for one with its GB-101 hood and a Contax 95 mm filter; a copy graded as junk, with fungus and haze inside, still made ¥108,776, and one with a faulty diaphragm sold for ¥52,380.

Since production ended the lens has found a second use on digital bodies. Leica’s S-Adapter C of 2013 gives it full autofocus and diaphragm control on the Leica S, where the 45 × 30 mm sensor makes it roughly a 28 mm equivalent, and Fringer’s C645-GFX adapter of 2017 and its successor autofocus it on Fujifilm GFX, Fringer placing it, like every other autofocus lens of the system used without the Mutar, among the lenses with “better AF performance”. GL Optics rehouses it as a T3.5 cine lens. Shige’s test on a Leica S found it crisp and high-resolving slightly stopped down, the most resolution-minded of the three wide Distagons, with barrel distortion showing on grid-like subjects at 1–3 m and flare and ghosting into the light without the hood. The S sensor uses only the inner 45 × 30 mm of the 645 image, so his even illumination says little about the film corners, which Zeiss’s own curve shows much darker at full aperture.

When buying, test the autofocus and the diaphragm on a Contax 645 body or an electronic adapter: the diaphragm is driven only by the lens’s own stepping motor, so a lens whose electronics have failed cannot simply be stopped down by hand, and Kyocera stopped accepting Contax cameras and lenses for repair after 30 April 2015, referring owners to Repair Service Suwa. Look at the nine contacts, at the large front element for scratches, and inside for haze, which Shige suspects added to the flare on his own copy. The GB-101 hood was an ¥11,200 accessory and comes with some used copies; filters are 95 mm, the size the Vario-Sonnar 45-90 and Tele-Apotessar 350 also take. For close work Shige’s page on the lens lists the 13 mm and 26 mm Auto Extension Tubes as usable, by his own calculation reaching about 0.5× and 0.9×, while the 52 mm tube cannot reach focus with it; his accessories page, though, doubts that tubes are practical on anything shorter than 55 mm. The Mutar 1.4x teleconverter cannot be used at all: Zeiss restricts it to the telephoto lenses because its protruding front element would collide with the others.

Left open: the number of diaphragm blades, the production total, any serial-to-year table, a Kyocera document for the Japanese list price, and whether the focus motor is ultrasonic.