Distagon T* 55mm f/3.5 (Contax 645)

The Distagon T* 3,5/55 was the last prime lens added to Kyocera’s Contax 645, the autofocus 6×4.5 SLR of 1999, three years after the six launch lenses and two after the Tele-Apotessar 350; only the Vario-Sonnar 45-90 zoom came later, in August 2002. Kyocera Optics announced it in the United States on 24 February 2002 as the “Carl Zeiss M Distagon T* 55mm f3.5”, and Zeiss printed its data sheet on 29 May 2002. The sheet gives catalogue number 10 49 59, seven elements in seven groups, a focal length of 55.0 mm covering 54° by 41° (65° on the diagonal) of the 41.5 × 56 mm frame, f/3.5 to f/32, closest focus 0.45 m at a scale of 1:5.5, an M72 × 0.75 filter thread, 81 mm across by 75 mm long, and 500 g. Kyocera’s release agrees except on two points, 64.7° and 525 g. On Zeiss’s figures it is the lightest lens the system had, lighter even than the Planar 80. Zeiss presented it as the compact, light, all-purpose wide-angle of the system, giving pictures similar to a 35 mm lens on a 35 mm SLR, for photojournalism, street work, weddings, interiors and group pictures of up to a hundred people. Kyocera pitched it as the focal length between the Distagon 45 and the Planar 80 and, for wedding photographers, as a slightly wider alternative to the 80. It named the Dual Focus Mechanism, “eco-glass” and improved internal baffling against stray light, and put the street price at $1,475.

It works like the other lenses of the system, with no mechanical link to the body. Kyocera’s repair manual for the system describes the arrangement for all its lenses: a focus motor and a stepping motor that sets the diaphragm in eighth-stop steps sit in the lens, and a lens CPU drives both on the body’s instructions. The 55 talks to the body through a curved row of nine gold contacts inside the bayonet. The focusing ring is mechanically linked to the distance scale and, under what Kyocera calls the Dual Focus Mechanism, can be turned during autofocus to take over by hand. Shige, who uses the lens on a Leica S, notes that the ring keeps turning past infinity and past the closest distance, with a change of feel at both ends, and that the filter thread does not rotate. The aperture ring clicks in half stops, is numbered 3,5 and then 5,6 with no 4, and works only on a Contax 645 body. Zeiss’s curves for the 645 frame are less flattering than its text, which promises “smooth corner-to-corner illumination”. At f/3.5 the extreme corner of the frame gets about 30 per cent of the light at the centre, rising to about two-thirds at f/8, and barrel distortion grows steadily to about 1.8 per cent of image height at the corner. The sheet still calls the distortion “remarkably low”, and at f/8 its coarsest contrast curves, at 10 line pairs per millimetre, stay at 80 per cent or more out to the corner. Every barrel photographed reads “Lens made in Japan”. The “M” of Kyocera’s announcement is a trade name that the American dealer Camera World was already using for the launch lenses in May 2000; it does not appear on the lens.

There is one version, made from 2002 until Contax 645 production ended at the end of April 2005. It came in as the cheap wide-angle and has become the dear one. Shige’s lens table gives ¥150,000 before tax in Japan against ¥250,000 for the Distagon 45, though no Kyocera price list is known to confirm either figure. In a forum thread of November 2003 one prospective buyer saw it for sale on eBay at about $700 and at an online dealer for $849, and reckoned the 45 cost about $580 more. The one member of the thread who owned both lenses had not noticed either performing better; an owner of the 45 alone thought the difference in image quality very small, and another, who had used the 55 but owned the 45, preferred the 45 for landscapes. In 2026 the order has reversed. Three copies sold on Yahoo! Auctions in July and August 2026 fetched ¥289,800, ¥339,801 with its GB-72 hood, and ¥350,903 after 52 bids. Kamerastore gives an average price of about $2,940 for a copy in its Certified condition and was sold out in October 2026. On the same auction site a boxed, working Distagon 45 fetched about ¥191,000 in October 2026, and one sold with fungus about ¥45,000. Shige explains the reversal by supply: on his dating the 55 came about two years after the 45 (three, on Kyocera’s dates), close to Kyocera’s withdrawal from cameras, and may have been made in smaller numbers. No production figure is known to confirm it, and the three serial numbers recorded here, 15126713, 15126948 and 15127248, fall within 535 of one another.

Since the system ended the lens has found a second use on digital bodies. Leica’s S-Adapter C of 2013 gives it autofocus and diaphragm control on the Leica S, whose 45 × 30 mm sensor makes it roughly a 44 mm equivalent by Shige’s reckoning. Fringer’s C645-GFX adapter gives it autofocus on Fujifilm GFX, where Fringer puts it, with every other autofocus lens of the system used without the Mutar, in its group with the better autofocus performance. GL Optics rehouses it as a T3.5 cine lens. Shige’s test on a Leica S (Typ 007) found its autofocus among the quicker ones in the system, although it can still hunt behind a wire fence or against foliage. He found the rendering consistent across the frame from f/3.5, with smooth if limited background blur and little flare or ghosting against the light, even without a hood. He puts it between the resolution-minded Distagon 35 and the softer 45. His pictures come from the S sensor, which uses only the inner part of the 645 image; on film the corners of the full frame are darker at full aperture, where Zeiss’s curve gives them about 30 per cent of the light at the centre.

When buying, test the autofocus and the diaphragm on a Contax 645 body or an electronic adapter. On Kyocera’s description the diaphragm moves only under the lens’s own stepping motor, the aperture ring merely sending a setting to the lens CPU, so a lens whose electronics have failed cannot be stopped down by hand. Kyocera stopped accepting Contax cameras and lenses for repair after 30 April 2015 and refers owners to Repair Service Suwa, for film cameras only. Look at the nine contacts and inside for dust and haze. The lens was sold with front and rear caps and a case. The GB-72 petal hood, shared with the Planar 80, is priced at ¥11,200 in Shige’s list of the system’s accessories and sold alone for ¥16,800 on Yahoo! Auctions in May 2026. The Distagon 45’s GB-71 also fits, though Shige finds it may be too shallow for this lens, and the GB-B1 bellows hood fits every 72 mm lens of the system. Shige lists all three Auto Extension Tubes as usable with it, the 52 mm tube taking it to about life size by his own estimate. The Mutar 1.4x teleconverter cannot be used: it fits only the Sonnar 140, the Sonnar 210 and the Tele-Apotessar 350.

Left open: the production total, any serial-to-year table, the Japanese release date and a Kyocera document for the yen price, the number of diaphragm blades from a maker source, whether the focus motor is ultrasonic (Japanese Wikipedia says so of every autofocus lens in the system; Kyocera’s repair manual says only “motor”, and its release for this lens names only the Dual Focus Mechanism), and which Kyocera plant or contractor made the lens.