Distagon 60mm f/5.6 (C)

The Distagon name began with a 60mm f/5.6 for Hasselblad. Marco Cavina’s article on the 1000F-mount lens credits the design to Günther Lange, head of the calculation office at Carl Zeiss Oberkochen, with a German priority patent filed on 8 July 1953 and the lens shown at that autumn’s Photokina: six elements, arranged as a divergent front meniscus ahead of a five-element, three-group main system with two cemented doublets. That lens has the 1600F/1000F bayonet, no shutter, a 54×0.75 mm filter thread and a 1 m closest focus, and it is catalogued here separately, because its mount does not fit any 500-series body.

The lens on this page is the second one. When the 500C arrived in 1957 with its Synchro-Compur lenses, Hasselblad Historical’s lens list has a Distagon f/5.6 60 mm C at the head of the wide-angle column, ahead of the Planar 80, and the 500C’s own entry on this site counts it among the launch lenses; lens-db dates it 1957 as well. Kamerastore’s specification page puts the introduction in 1958, “shortly after the 500C”, and the two accounts are not far apart — a lens announced with the body and delivered the following year would satisfy both. The chrome barrel, EV interlock lever and Series 63 drop-in filter are the standard early-C pattern; Kamerastore gives about 490 g and a 0.55 m closest focus.

What sits inside the barrel is the unsettled question. Zeiss’s factory data sheet for the design number 10 41 02, hosted by Hasselblad Historical, shows the six-element, four-group cross-section — but that sheet describes the F-mount barrel of the 1000F lens. Lens-db and Kamerastore carry the 6/4 count over to the C lens with the word “supposedly”; Cavina states that the 500C version, arriving four years after the original, received a revised optical scheme, without giving its counts; and Japanese Wikipedia lists it with seven elements. No Zeiss document consulted here describes the C lens’s glass, so this entry gives no element count and draws no schematic until one does.

Numbers are thin and hedged. Kamerastore estimates 1,500–2,000 made; Cavina writes that only 2,200 pieces were distributed in four years, but his article concerns the 1000F-mount lens and it is not clear which of the two lenses, or both, the figure covers. The run was short either way: Kamerastore has it discontinued in 1961, Cavina dates the f/4 successor to 1961 and Kamerastore to 1962, and the Distagon 60mm f/4 (C) took its place in the range. No list price in any currency was found, and the lens ended before black barrels (1969) or T* multicoating (1973) reached the C line, so every example is chrome and single-coated.

Still open: the C lens’s actual optical prescription and whether it differs from the 1953 design, a firm introduction month, a production figure from Zeiss or Hasselblad records rather than dealer estimates, and the 1957–1961 price.