S-Planar / Makro-Planar 135mm f/5.6 (bellows)

The 135mm f/5.6 is the one Hasselblad V lens that cannot be focused on its own. Zeiss’s data sheet for the C version puts it in the first sentence: “The S-PLANAR f/5.6 - 135 mm is designed for use with a bellows extension, so it has no worm-wheel drive for focusing.” On the Hasselblad bellows “the focusing range of the lens is continuous from infinity to scale 1 : 1,” which the sheet places at 0.54 m. The rest of the sheet — catalogue number 107711, seven elements in five groups, an exact focal length of 137.1 mm, an aperture scale from f/5.6 to f/45, a Compur size 0 shutter with automatic diaphragm, a bayonet for series 50 filters, 560 g — describes a leaf-shuttered macro cell rather than a lens in the usual sense. Japanese Wikipedia dates its release to 1968, four or five years after the helical-focusing S-Planar 120mm f/5.6 it was built to complement.

Zeiss positioned it exactly as it had the 120. “Like the S-PLANAR f/5.6 - 120 mm, the S-PLANAR f/5.6 - 135 mm is optimally corrected for close-range work,” the sheet says, and “owing to its relatively constant correction over a broad scale range, the lens can also be used successfully for distance if it is stopped down slightly more than a normal lens.” Emulsive’s guide to the C lenses gives the same 7/5, B50 and 560 g, an 85 mm length, and notes the lens’s adaptability to landscape and portraiture despite its purpose. The barrel followed the C line’s finishes: chrome first, black anodising available from 1969 per Emulsive, and T* multicoating from 1973/74 — Emulsive has all C lenses single-coated until 1974, and Japanese Wikipedia has T* marks appearing “from around 1974, progressively.” No source dates the 135’s own changeovers, and Zeiss’s red-ink date code inside the rear mount is the only way to place an individual lens.

In 1982 the lens changed name without changing glass. The CF barrel brought the Prontor CF shutter, a push-button EV interlock, the green F setting for the focal-plane bodies and a bayonet-60 filter mount, and the name ring now read Makro-Planar — Zeiss’s blanket renaming of its Hasselblad S-Planars at the CF changeover. The CF sheet (catalogue number 10 78 24) lists the same seven elements in five groups and the same 137.1 mm focal length, at 620 g, and Emulsive’s CF guide calls the CF optically identical to the S-Planar C (its “7 elements in 4 groups” is the outlier against both Zeiss sheets). Zeiss now sold the pairing harder: with the bellows “the photographer has a camera that can quickly focus from infinity down to life size without any further accessories,” with “a fast central shutter, offering flash synchronisation to 1/500 s” — “this high performance combination is unique in medium format.” That is why the two names sit in one family here: the rename was a label, not a redesign.

The lens did not survive the CF line. Hasselblad Historical’s index lists the S-Planar f/5.6 135 mm under C and the Makro-Planar f/5.6 135 mm under CF, and nothing under CB, CFi or CFE, so 1998 — the end of the CF generation — is taken as its end. Zeiss’s CFi sheet for the 120mm Makro-Planar still pointed to “the Makro-Planar 5,6/135 CF with bellows” as the route to 1:1, so the lens was on sale, or at least in stock, into the CFi era. KEH catalogues it “for use with bellows, or variable extension tube,” and Emulsive names the discontinued Variable Extension Tube 64–85 as the alternative to the bellows.

What remains open: the 1968 date rests on Japanese Wikipedia alone, and one lens database gives a much earlier year that neither Zeiss sheet supports; who at Zeiss Oberkochen designed the lens; the serial or date-code boundaries of the chrome, black and T* barrels; a documented discontinuation date rather than an inferred one; any list price — Victor Hasselblad Inc.’s 1973 and 1980 American price lists exist as large scans and were not read here; and production figures, which would have to come from Nordin’s compendia.