Glass Bodies a variant-level encyclopedia of vintage lenses and cameras by iwillpat

Sonnar 13.5cm f/4

Carl Zeiss · Contax RF · 1932 · Sonnar

Also known as: Zeiss Sonnar 135mm f/4 · Sonnar 13.5cm f4

Variants & identification

Variant Mount Years Serial ranges Production
Carl Zeiss Jena Contax RF 1932–1945 from about 1368701 — the original 1932 lens in black and nickel, nickel scale at the lower end of the aperture ring and a wholly nickel focusing ring, no filter thread, f/32 minimum
roughly 1435401–1720000 — the third version, 1933, the nickel aperture scale moved from the rear of the ring to the front
1631614 and 1631652 — two known examples of the first 1935 chrome lenses, otherwise like the 1933 type with no filter thread and an f/16 minimum
near 2000000 — the 1937 optical revision: bigger front element, smaller rear, minimum aperture changed to f/22
2847xxx — the last wartime variation, a small batch that is T-coated 		No figure published
Oberkochen / Zeiss Opton Contax RF 1950–1961 91201–93600, 661001–662000, 890401–892000 and 1130501–1131500 — the Zeiss-Opton batches of the 1950 reformulation, about 6,100 lenses, most carrying the red T
1308101–1308700, 1344001–1344200, 1522501–1523700, 1599801–1602800 and 1896501–1898600 — the batches engraved Carl Zeiss from 1953, an estimated 7,000 lenses, without the T marking because by then everything was coated 		No figure published
  1. Every serial block here comes from Pacific Rim Camera's version-by-version account of the 135/4, which also gives production totals the variant table does not: about 6,100 Zeiss-Opton lenses and an estimated 7,000 engraved Carl Zeiss.
  2. The first Carl Zeiss batch is printed on the source page as a run-together '13081011308700'; it is read here as 1308101–1308700, in line with the other batches, but the digits as printed are ambiguous.
  3. A 2025 study of the 135 Sonnar at JAPB, which examined close to a thousand samples, declines to give serial ranges for the Contax rangefinder generation at all, 'because there are several instances where a serial number range contains samples of both an earlier and a later design', and judges the camera-wiki table 'clearly lacking in precision'. It names Thiele's Fabrikationsbuch Photooptik II as the source it lacks access to.
  4. The published Jena year table stops at 1942, around 2,900,000, so the wartime lenses of 1943–45 cannot be dated from the running number alone.
  5. The first postwar batch is dated and placed differently by the two sources that describe it, and the difference is not trivial. Pacific Rim Camera calls 91201–93600 part of the Zeiss-Opton batches of a 1950 reformulation. Ghisetti, reading the Zeiss-Opton registers, has the 135mm f/4 as the first Contax lens of the whole postwar West German programme, produced in 1949 and at Coburg rather than Oberkochen, opening at 91.001. On his account Opton production of 1948–49 was carried out entirely at Coburg by the subsidiary Hans Kollmorgen, 1950–51 was split between Coburg and Oberkochen, and only 1952–53 is Oberkochen alone — so the variant name "Oberkochen / Zeiss Opton" above is too tidy for the earliest lenses. Weighing the two: Ghisetti's is the better-evidenced account. He is reading the Zeiss-Opton production registers and can name the arrangement behind the dates, down to which subsidiary assembled the lenses in which years, where Pacific Rim Camera publishes no source for its version list at all. The serial figures are not really in conflict — 91.001 as the opening of the series and 91201–93600 as an observed batch inside it differ by two hundred numbers and sit comfortably together — so what is actually disputed is the year and the place, and on both Ghisetti has a record behind him and Pacific Rim does not. The variant's first year is nonetheless left at 1950, because Ghisetti's 1949 is one reading of a register this project has not seen and the entry should not quietly restate a date on a single scholar's authority. Read the 1950 above as the conservative figure rather than the settled one.
  6. Ghisetti supplies the reason the 135's postwar numbers look wrong beside the other Contax lenses. Contax-specific Zeiss-Opton numbers proper begin at 47,000, with the 50mm f/1,5 Sonnar of 1951; the 135s, at 91,001, carry higher numbers and were nonetheless built two years earlier. The running number cannot be used to order the postwar lenses among themselves.
  7. Corroboration was sought for the batch lists above and only partly found. Ghisetti independently confirms the out-of-order 1,500,000 lots, the prewar red T, the brass postwar Jena barrels and the 1949 start of the Zeiss-Opton 135, but he publishes no batch ranges of his own. The five Zeiss-Opton and five Carl Zeiss batch blocks in the variant table still rest on Pacific Rim Camera alone, and the JAPB study of 2025 declines to give ranges at all. No second published list of them was found.
  8. Two Japanese owners' accounts: a 1933 black-nickel lens (serial in the 1,455,000s) weighs about 530 g with its hood, focuses to about 1.5 m, mounts on the outer bayonet — an outer-claw adapter is needed on anything else, or it jams — and is compact beside a Leica 135 of the day, if front-heavy on a Contax I (aremo-koremo); fortia found it, against expectation, 'crisp like a recent lens' with high contrast front-lit.
How to tell them apart (expand)
  • External bayonet with its own focusing ring
  • The longest coupled lens in the ordinary Contax range — everything above it needs a reflex housing

Carl Zeiss Jena:

  • Black and nickel for the Contax I; chrome for the II and III

Serial-range notes

the whole number
How to date one. Carl Zeiss drew every photographic lens number from a single running sequence covering all models at once, so a Zeiss lens is dated by reading its number off a serial/year table rather than by counting within its own type — there is no per-model list of the Leitz kind. The table, taken from Wilkinson and Glanfield's A Lens Collector's Vade Mecum, runs the Jena sequence from 173,418 in 1912 to about 2,900,000 in 1942; camera-wiki and Craig Camera publish near-identical copies of it. The 1912 opening is given here as Craig Camera and the Leica Contax blog print it. Camera-wiki transposes it to 137,418, which the Vade Mecum's own quantity column rules out — the blog's copy of the 1912 row reads "173,418 - 200,520 27,102", and only the first reading subtracts to the published 27,102.
1364483–2900000
The Jena year boundaries that bracket this lens's prewar production, from camera-wiki: 1932 = 1,364,483–1,389,279; 1933 = 1,436,671–1,456,003; 1934 = 1,500,474–1,590,000; 1935 = 1,615,764–1,752,303; 1936 = 1,674,882–1,942,806; 1937 = 1,930,150–2,219,775; 1938 = 2,267,991–2,527,984; 1939 = 2,527,999–2,651,211; 1940 = 2,652,000–2,678,000; 1941 = 2,678,326–2,790,346; 1942 = 2,800,000–2,900,000.
above 3000000 (Jena) against 10000–3000000 (Oberkochen)
After 1945 the sequence forks, and the same figure means two different decades. Carl Zeiss Jena in the East carried the old numbers on from 3,000,000 — 3,000,000–3,200,000 = 1945–49, 3,200,000–3,470,000 = 1949–52, 3,470,000–4,000,000 = 1952–55, 4,000,000–5,000,000 = 1955–58, 5,000,000–6,000,000 = 1958–61. Carl Zeiss Oberkochen in the West began a fresh sequence at 10,000 in 1946 — 10,000–500,000 = 1946–51, 500,000–1,100,000 = 1951–53, 1,100,000–2,600,000 = 1953–59, 2,600,000–3,000,000 = 1959–61. This lens shows the fork plainly: a Zeiss-Opton 135 numbered 91201 is a 1950 lens, where 91,201 on a Jena barrel would be nineteenth-century.
1505101
The clearest published case of Zeiss numbers running out of order. Pacific Rim Camera reports the first chrome 135 as reputedly 1505101, a number the year table places in 1934, although serial production in chrome began in 1935 — and black-and-nickel and chrome lenses appear to overlap. Blocks were allotted to production in sequence but batches were not always finished in block order, which is why the published year ranges overlap and a serial places a lens within a year or two rather than to a month. Ghisetti reaches the same block independently and from the registers rather than from the year table, and pushes it later still: he gives lots of 13,5cm Sonnars opening at 1,500,000, a sequence that normally means 1934, as having in fact been assigned to lenses built in 1936 and after, and suggests they were special series, particular orders or pre-production. He names the mid-1930s overlap of black-and-nickel with chrome as a second source of the same confusion.
from 3053101
Carl Zeiss Jena's first postwar 135s, brought out in 1947 in polished aluminium barrels with black noses — optically the prewar design but coated. A small number followed in chrome-plated brass in 1948 or 1949. These are East German lenses, and the variant table above, which runs the Jena lens to 1945 and picks up again at Oberkochen in 1950, does not list them. Ghisetti confirms both halves from the other side: he lists the 13,5cm Sonnar among the prewar designs Carl Zeiss Jena reissued after the war, and calls the belief that postwar Jena barrels were all aluminium a commonplace worth dispelling — several lots were brass, being prewar warehouse stock reassembled. He also dates the end of the East German line, at April 1955 for regular Contax-bayonet production.
a red T on a prewar chrome barrel
Consistent with a wartime lens rather than proof of a postwar one. Coating was normally reserved for military optics, usually in Leica screw mount, but Ghisetti records that some ordinary Contax-bayonet lenses of the years right up against the war were given the red T too, and names the 13,5cm Sonnar among them. That is a second and independent source for the T-coated 2847xxx batch above, which until now rested on Pacific Rim Camera alone.
a letter followed by five digits
Not a lens number at all. That is the Zeiss Ikon CAMERA sequence, inherited from ICA in 1909, which rolls to the next letter at 99,999, reached Z in 1936 and restarted at A. A Contax body number and a Zeiss lens number belong to separate schemes and must never be read against the same table.

Specifications

Formula
Sonnar
Construction
4 elements / 3 groups
Aperture range
f/4
Min. focus
1.5 m
Years manufactured
1932–1961
Country
Germany

What reviewers say

History

The 13.5cm Sonnar is where the coupled Contax range stops. Longer lenses existed — an 18cm Tele-Tessar, a 30cm, a 50cm Fernobjektiv — but they mount directly or through the Flektoskop reflex housing and are not focused by the rangefinder.

At f/4 it is modest, which at 135mm on a rangefinder is sensible: the Contax’s 90mm base focuses it accurately, and a faster lens would demand more precision than any rangefinder can deliver.

Like the other Sonnars, its drawings went to the Soviet Union in 1945. It reappeared as the Jupiter-11 and was still being made in the 1980s.

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This history is AI-written, from the sources listed at the foot of the page. Where the record is silent it says so rather than filling the gap — but no human wrote these sentences.

Example photos

Sample photo wanted — shot with a Sonnar 13.5cm f/4? We'd love to feature it (with credit).

Live listings

Asking price, USD: a median of $220 across 15 fixed-price listings on 2026-09-11 (middle half $140–$250). Tracked since 2026-09-06, 2 days: unchanged from $220.

By day
DateMedianMiddle halfListings
2026-09-11$220$140–$25015
2026-09-06$220$140–$25015

Asking prices from the listings scanned, not sales; junk-flagged rows and auction lots excluded; other currencies are not converted.

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Listings updated 2026-09-11. Links go to the shop or marketplace that carries the item.

Related: Sonnar 8.5cm f/2 · Jupiter-11 135mm f/4

Sources (11)

Every page here is assembled from public sources, and the gaps are real ones. If you own this lens, know a serial number I'm missing, or can see where I have it wrong, tell me — corrections, serials and sample photos are all worth having.