Sonnar T* 210mm f/4 (Contax 645)

The Sonnar T* 210mm f/4 was one of the six Carl Zeiss lenses Kyocera launched the Contax 645 with in 1999, and the longest telephoto of the system until the Tele-Apotessar 350 was introduced in February 2000. Carl Zeiss’s data sheet, catalogue number 10 11 39 and printed on 9 March 1999, describes seven elements in four groups with internal focusing: 209.6 mm, 19° across the 41.5 × 56 mm frame, f/4 to f/45, focusing to 1.4 m, with a 72 mm filter thread, 81 × 177 mm and about 1,178 g. That makes it physically the longest and heaviest lens of the range after the 350. Zeiss likened it to a 135 mm lens on a 35 mm Contax, as Kyocera’s instruction manual and German Wikipedia do, and wrote it up for portraits, fashion, beauty, sport, the stage, children and animals, promising “perfect corner-to-corner uniformity even at wide open aperture”. The sheet’s MTF curves at f/4 for 10 and 20 cycles/mm run nearly level across the frame, the tangential ones falling away only towards the extreme corner, and its other curves show pincushion distortion rising to just under 2% at the corners, and about 60% of the centre’s light reaching the extreme corners wide open, a little over 80% at f/8. Zeiss designed it and it was built in Japan: a photographed 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 Zeiss supplied the lenses and collection-appareils that Zeiss designed them in Germany; neither describes German manufacture.

Like every autofocus lens in the system it focuses and stops down with its own motors. Kyocera’s repair manual puts a focus motor and an aperture stepping motor, which moves in eighth-stop steps, inside the lens, and nine gold contacts in the bayonet carry the signals. Focus mode is set on the body’s dial, and the focusing ring can be turned after autofocus has locked. Whether the focus motor is ultrasonic is unsettled: Japanese Wikipedia says every autofocus lens in the system has one and PRONEWS that the system’s autofocus uses one, while Kyocera’s US release of February 2000 presents the ultrasonic motor as a feature of the Tele-Apotessar 350, and the repair manual says only that the motor is in the lens. That same release introduced the Mutar 1.4x converter, “matched for use on” this lens, the Sonnar 140 and the 350, and Zeiss’s sheet for the converter says it works very well with the 210. On the 210 it makes a 294 mm f/5.6 and keeps autofocus. The dedicated hood is the GB-74, which Shige’s hobby, a collector’s site that has used the lens on a Leica S, lists at ¥7,000; the GB-B1 bellows hood also mounts on it, though Shige gives its range as 45 to 120 mm. With Kyocera’s Auto Extension Tubes Shige measured the 210 focusing between about 1.2 and 3.8 m on the 13 mm tube, 1.1 and 2.1 m on the 26 mm and 0.75 and 0.95 m on the 52 mm.

Popular Photography’s bench test of November 1999, known now from the figures Mamiya America reprinted in a 2001 brochure, found 64 lines/mm at the centre wide open, rated excellent, easing to 51 at f/5.6 and f/8 and to between 40 and 45 from f/11 to f/32. The corners started at 28 at f/4, reached 40 at f/8 and stayed in the mid-30s to f/45. In Mamiya’s brochure its own AF 210mm f/4 IF, tested by the magazine in April 2000, was ahead at both centre and corners from f/4 to f/16; the Zeiss lens scored higher at f/22 and f/32. Shige, using the lens on a Leica S (Typ 007) through the S-Adapter C, finds enough resolution wide open and smooth blur behind and in front of the subject. He finds autofocus about as fast as the Sonnar 140’s and not very accurate, hunting close up and on low-contrast subjects, so that taking over by hand, or focusing manually from the start, is less trouble. With the Mutar the picture holds up, but purple fringes appear on the edges of trees, especially when overexposed, which he thinks is partly because the lens is not apochromatic. He calls it larger and heavier than a 200 mm lens for 35 mm: the Leica S outfit weighs 2.7 kg with it, and over 3 kg with the Mutar. Owners at the time weighed that bulk too: johnw on the DPR Forum in July 2005 carried the Sonnar 140 and the Mutar in a light three-lens travel kit rather than also carrying the 210. Leica’s S-Adapter C of 2013 takes every Contax 645 lens, with autofocus on all but the manual-focus 120. Fringer puts the 210, with every other autofocus lens in the system, in its “better AF performance” group for its Fujifilm GFX adapter, and the 210 with the Mutar among the combinations whose autofocus is degraded. GL Optics rehouses it as a T4 cine lens with a 15-blade iris of its own.

Camera World of Portland advertised it in May 2000 as the “M-Sonnar 210mm f/4.0” at $2,255, the same as the Sonnar 140. Shige’s lens table gives a yen list price of ¥250,000 before tax, between the 140’s ¥245,000 and the Apo-Makro-Planar 120’s ¥270,000. No maker’s tag or price list for the 210 itself has turned up, but his figure for the 140 is the one printed on a Carl Zeiss swing tag found with a boxed 140, as the maker’s suggested price before consumption tax. Shige says the used price “has dropped drastically”, and his table starts 2023 prices at ¥30,000. On Yahoo! Auctions in 2026 a copy sold untested for ¥8,750 in October. One described as clean and working but listed as junk made ¥11,577 after 51 bids in September, a boxed store copy ¥27,010 in October, and a tested one ¥29,800 at a fixed price in July. Two Sonnar 140s, neither tested on a body, made ¥53,222 in May and ¥90,810 in August there. Ffordes offered one with hood, caps and pouch at £299 in October. One Yahoo seller who sold a body, Planar 80, Distagon 45 and 210 together in September 2026 had the body and the other two lenses inspected and repaired at Repair Service Suwa first, but not the 210, because the work would cost more than the lens would recover. That sets the buying advice. Pay for a copy shown working on a Contax 645 body or an electronic adapter, since its diaphragm and focus move only under their own motors. Look for haze and dust inside the long barrel and for clean contacts. Kyocera stopped accepting Contax repairs on 30 April 2015 and now refers owners to Repair Service Suwa.

There is one version. No optical revision, finish or edition has turned up. Serials come in a seven-digit form (8782178, 8786861) and an eight-digit one (15043260), close to the Sonnar 140’s own numbers, with no table to date either. The one boxed copy examined came with an Apo-Makro-Planar 120 leaflet alongside its Sonnar 210 carton, so papers are no proof of what is in the box. The namesakes in other systems carry other names: Mamiya’s 645 AF 210mm f/4 ULD IF and manual-focus Sekor C 210mm f/4, Hasselblad’s HC 210mm f/4 for the H system, and the Contax/Yashica Vario-Sonnar 70–210mm f/3.5 zoom for 35 mm. A Sonnar engraved 4/210 with gold contacts can only be this one.

Still open: any production figure or serial table, which Kyocera plant made the lens, the number of aperture blades, a yen list price from Kyocera itself, and whether the focus motor is ultrasonic.