S-Planar 120mm f/5.6

The S-Planar 120mm f/5.6 was the first lens Zeiss built for the Hasselblad 500-series that was corrected for close range rather than for infinity. Its Zeiss data sheet is explicit about what the letter means: “As indicated by the designation ‘S’, the S-Planar T* f/5.6-120 mm is a special lens,” corrected for close-range work “such as drawing reproductions and technical subjects where the standards of image quality and freedom from distortion are much higher than for pictorial photography.” The same sheet gives the hard figures — six elements in four groups, an exact focal length of 121 mm, an aperture scale from f/5.6 to f/45, a Compur size 0 shutter with automatic diaphragm, a bayonet for Hasselblad’s series 50 filters, 0.95 m closest focus and 640 g. When it arrived is less firm: Japanese Wikipedia dates the S-Planar C 120mm to 1963, dealer and database listings give 1964, and no Zeiss or Hasselblad document consulted here settles it.

Zeiss was candid about the trade-off. The S-Planar’s correction, the sheet says, “is relatively invulnerable to changes in image scale” and so the lens “can therefore be used successfully for distance shots, too, but should be stopped down somewhat further than a ‘normal’ lens of comparable focal length.” Below 0.95 m Zeiss wanted extension tubes or the bellows, not close-up lenses: “the use of Proxars has an unfavorable effect on the S-Planar’s T* correction.” Emulsive’s guide to the C lenses repeats the practical reading — best correction at f/11, technical macro first, landscapes when stopped down — and adds the one barrel-level detail no sheet gives, that early lenses stopped down only to f/32 and later ones to f/45.

The barrel followed the rest of the C line. Chrome satin was the original finish; Emulsive has black-anodised C barrels available from 1969 and states that “from 1959 until 1974 all C lenses were single coated,” with Zeiss beginning T* multicoating in 1973. Japanese Wikipedia puts T* marks on the Hasselblad lenses “from around 1974, progressively.” So a chrome S-Planar is always single-coated, a black one is usually T*, and a black lens without the red T* marks the short transition between. No source consulted gives the month of the 120mm’s own changeovers or a serial boundary, and Zeiss’s red-ink date code inside the rear mount — pre-1980, the last two digits the month and the leading digits plus 1957 the year — is the only dating tool for an individual lens.

The S-Planar’s end is documented by its successor. Zeiss’s sheet for the Makro-Planar CF 4/120 of 1982 says the new lens, “like its predecessor, the 120 mm S-Planar T* f/5.6 lens,” consists of six elements in four groups “arranged almost symmetrically to the iris diaphragm,” and calls it “a major achievement on the part of the designer” that the aperture could be opened to f/4 “without exceeding the optical dimensions of the f/5.6 lens.” Hasselblad Historical’s lens index lists the S-Planar f/5.6 120 mm under the C generation only; there was never a CF, F or FE S-Planar, and the S-Planar name itself passed to Zeiss’s microlithography lenses, as the later CFi Makro-Planar sheet notes. Its bellows-only sibling, the S-Planar 135mm f/5.6, shared the naming and the fate.

What remains open: the launch year (1963 or 1964); which Zeiss designer computed the lens — no source names one; the serial or date-code boundaries of the chrome-to-black and single-to-T* transitions and of the f/32-to-f/45 aperture-scale change; any list price — Victor Hasselblad Inc.’s 1973 and 1980 American price lists exist as large scans and were not read for this entry; and production figures, which would have to come from Nordin’s compendia.