Mirotar 1000mm f/5.6

Hasselblad catalogued the Carl Zeiss Mirotar 5.6/1000 in 1978 as a special order — the year after the 2000FC introduced a focal-plane shutter to the V system, and the only way a lens without a shutter of its own could be used at all. Hasselblad’s own catalogue copy, reproduced by lens-db, calls it the longest focal length of all the lenses in the Hasselblad system and describes “a mirror telephoto optic with the same basic design as an astronomical telescope,” reasoning that because the optical system consists largely of mirrors, the chromatic aberrations that dominate very long refracting lenses are eliminated rather than merely corrected.

The handling consequences are severe and were stated plainly at the time. There is no iris: the aperture is fixed at f/5.6 and exposure is trimmed by a turret of three switchable neutral-density filters giving effective apertures of f/5.6, f/8 and f/11, so depth of field never changes with exposure. The catalogue calls the lens too heavy for hand-held photography, which is an understatement — pentaconsix.com, citing Richard Nordin’s Hasselblad System Compendium, puts the Oberkochen Mirotar at about 16.5 kg, some 2.5 kg heavier than the Carl Zeiss Jena 1000 mm f/5.6 mirror lens at about 14 kg. Closest focus is about 12 m.

How many reached customers is unknown. Pentaconsix.com’s phrasing, following Nordin, is that the lens was “briefly available (to special order!) for the Hasselblad, and was subsequently supplied for various Rollei and Contax SLRs” — a catalogue listing rather than a production line. A count of 22 examples built to special order between 1976 and 1978 circulates for the Contax/Yashica Mirotar; that figure describes the C/Y lens and cannot be transferred to the Hasselblad version, for which no quantity has been published. Individual examples do surface: Leitz Photographica Auction has offered a Mirotar 5.6/1000 more than once.

The documentary record is unusually thin for a Zeiss lens in this system. Hasselblad Historical’s Zeiss/Hasselblad lens index — the index that lists every C, CF, CB, CFi, CFE, F, FE and ZV Classic lens — does not mention the Mirotar in any group, and the associated collection of Zeiss data sheets holds none for it. That absence is itself informative: the sheets exist for lenses sold as catalogue items, and this one was not. The optical construction quoted here, five elements in five groups, is read off a third-party diagram published by allphotolenses.com rather than from any maker’s drawing, and for a catadioptric the count depends on whether the mirrors are counted as elements at all. For the same reason this entry carries no house cross-section: a two-mirror system with correctors cannot be drawn honestly in the schematic style used for refracting designs, so the third-party diagram is linked instead.

What remains open is nearly everything a catalogue page would normally settle: the number built in Hasselblad mount, whether any were built at all against orders rather than assembled from the Contax/Yashica run, the list price, the physical length and filter arrangements, the designer, the year it left the price list, and whether Zeiss ever published a data sheet for it. Nordin’s compendia are the obvious place to look and were not read directly for this entry; every figure above reaches this page at second hand.