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

Sonnar 13.5cm f/4

Carl Zeiss · Contax RF + M42 + Exakta · 1932 · Sonnar

our own finding

Also known as: Zeiss Sonnar 135mm f/4 · Sonnar 13.5cm f4 · Sonnar 135mm f/4 · Sonnar 135 mm f/4 · Sonnar 4/135 · Sonnar 4/135mm · Sonnar 4,0/135 · Sonnar 4.0/135 · Sonnar 135/4 · Sonnar 1:4 f=135 · Sonnar 1:4 f=135mm · Carl Zeiss Jena Sonnar 4/135 · Jena S 1:4 f=135 · Jena S 1:4 135mm · ゾナー 135mm 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
Carl Zeiss Jena reflex lens, M42 preset (1957–c.1965) M42 1957–1965 4876115–7236148 — the span JAPB observed for the preset lenses of all three reflex mounts together, not divided by mount
6096789 — in its quiver, whose label reads 'Sonnar 4/135 BV, Praktika/Pentacon, EVP DM 198,—' (Kleinanzeigen, April 2026)
6308336 and 7086292 — M42 presets offered on Kleinanzeigen in 2026
6885547 — an export preset engraved S 1:4 f=135 and Jena, offered as M42 in July 2026, though the listing's copied description also names the Exakta and the Praktina 		No figure by mount. Kröger counts about 83,000 lenses of the 1937 calculation in all, Contax and reflex together, until it was given up in April 1965
Carl Zeiss Jena reflex lens, M42 automatic (1961–c.1966) M42 1961–1966 6432060 — black barrel with the diamond-pattern grip, sold as M42 (Kleinanzeigen, October 2026)
6307376–7198302 for the black barrel with the plain textured band and 6539956–6928361 for the diamond band — JAPB's observed spans for the automatics, not divided by mount 		—
Carl Zeiss Jena reflex lens, Exakta preset (1957–c.1965) Exakta 1957–1965 — —
Carl Zeiss Jena reflex lens, Exakta automatic (1961–1969) Exakta 1961–1969 8127519 — zebra, with a cable release in the side arm (Kleinanzeigen, September 2026)
8129121 — zebra, export engraving S 1:4 f=135 … aus JENA (Kleinanzeigen, October 2026)
8437017 — the last f/4 zebra JAPB found, about 1969 		No figure for the whole run. Kröger counts just under 22,000 of the 1965 recalculation, made until the summer of 1969 and all with the Exakta bayonet except one lot of 900
Carl Zeiss Jena reflex lens, Praktina preset Praktina bayonet 1957 5604556 — Praktina bayonet, silver barrel (Kleinanzeigen, July 2026)
8127290 — Industrie- und Filmmuseum Wolfen, inventory Op 0064/07 		—
  1. Every serial block in the two Contax rows 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. The batch lists above are only partly corroborated. 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. The JAPB study of 2025 gives no batch list, only the span of the dozen or so Zeiss-Opton lenses it found, 92160–1130813, and from those numbers it ends the lens at Oberkochen in 1953 — several years before the later Pacific Rim batches, up to 1898600, would put it. JAPB gives 1961 separately as the end of the West German Contax itself. No second published list of the batches is known.
  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.
  9. Why the reflex lenses are on this page. Kröger, who works from the Zeiss calculation records, writes that the Sonnar 4/135 offered for the reflex mounts in 1957 was not a new calculation but Bertele's of 14 January 1937, the one the Contax lens had used since about 1937. His section of the 1937 calculation and JAPB's drawings of the preset and automatic lenses show the same arrangement and proportions: a thin front lens, a thin positive meniscus cemented to a thick negative, and a rear meniscus. JAPB's drawing of the Contax lens has the same four elements in three groups but a thicker positive in the cemented pair, and does not say which calculation it shows. Kröger also counts a 1955 attempt to improve the calculation a failure.
  10. Dates of the reflex lens. Kröger: offered in the reflex mounts in 1957, the Triotar stopped the following year. JAPB: from 1956. Ihagee's West German Exakta list of November 1957 has Jena's 135 only as the Triotar; that of October 1958 has the Sonnar at DM 294. Kröger's DDR price table has the preset at 198 Mark from June 1960 and no earlier entry. The page uses Kröger's 1957.
  11. The 1965 recalculation. Kröger dates the end of the 1937 calculation in the GDR to April 1965 and records a new f/4 calculation of 2 March 1965, built to the summer of 1969, almost all for the Exakta. JAPB finds the optics unchanged from preset to automatic. The two need not conflict, since a recalculation can keep a layout that a section drawing shows unchanged, but neither source says what changed, and no outward sign of the 1965 lenses is known beyond a late number on an Exakta automatic. They stay inside the Exakta automatic row.
  12. Reflex 13,5 cm lenses before 1957. Kröger pictures a Sonnar of 1949 from a lot of 600 made for the Contax that was refitted, apparently at the works, with an Exakta bayonet: the bayonet ring is cut away so as not to hide the depth-of-field scale, and the barrel lacks the straight guide of a proper reflex mount, which makes the lens look tiny. He reads it as Jena using up Contax lenses it could no longer sell once the Contax had moved to the Ukraine and Zeiss Opton was offering the lens too. A Sonnar 1:4 f=13,5 cm no. 3214098, in Jena's 1949–52 band, was offered in May 2023 in a lot with a Contax D and two Zeiss Ikon adapter rings; the photographs show a tall Contax-type barrel, the seller mentions only its screw cap, and the mount is not stated. Earlier still, the Kine Exakta price list of Photo Marketing Corp., New York, effective 1 March 1939, offers a 'Zeiss Sonnar F/4 13.5cm' for the Exakta at $130 on special import order only. None of the three is shown to have the 42 mm thread or to belong to a reflex series, so Kröger's 1957 stands as the start of the reflex lenses.
  13. Export engravings. Lenses for Western markets drop the Carl Zeiss and Sonnar names: the silver preset no. 6885547 reads S 1:4 f=135 and Jena; no. 6305936, a black automatic with a stop-down pin at the rear and no Exakta release arm, so most probably M42, reads Jena S 1:4 f=135 with 'Nr' before the number; and the Exakta zebra no. 8129121 reads S 1:4 f=135 and aus JENA. Ihagee's West German list calls the lens 'Jena S.'. Kröger also photographs a black automatic Sonnar 135 on a Praktina IIA without saying what mount it has, so a Praktina automatic is possible but not established here.
  14. Kröger's production figures by calculation: just under 6,000 lenses of the 1931 calculation; about 83,000 of the 1937 calculation, Contax and reflex lenses together, until April 1965; just under 22,000 of the 1965 f/4 to the summer of 1969. For comparison he counts hardly less than a third of a million of the Sonnar 3.5/135 in M42 to February 1988, plus nearly 30,000 as the Prakticar 3,5/135 — a faster lens on the same layout, not on this page.
How to tell them apart (expand)
  • On the Contax lenses: external bayonet with its own focusing ring
  • On the Contax lenses: the longest coupled lens in the ordinary Contax range — everything above it needs a reflex housing
  • On the reflex lenses: 49 mm filter and about 1.2 m closest focus, against 40.5 mm and 1.5 m on the Contax lens; f/4 to f/22

Carl Zeiss Jena:

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

Carl Zeiss Jena reflex lens, M42 preset (1957–c.1965):

  • Brushed aluminium barrel, silver all over, with two rings at the front — the preset ring and the aperture ring — and a focusing grip of raised knurled blocks; the front ring reads Sonnar 4/135, the number and Carl Zeiss Jena, or on export lenses S 1:4 f=135, the number and Jena (no. 6885547)
  • 42 mm screw thread with no stop-down pin: the diaphragm is turned down by hand to the preset value
  • 49 mm filter, f/4–22, closest focus about 1.2 m, where the Contax lens takes 40.5 mm and focuses to 1.5 m; m42lens gives 8 blades, 1.18 m, 375 g, 58 mm across and 105 mm long
  • BV on labels and in price lists marks the preset diaphragm (Blendenvorwahl); Kröger's DDR price lists call it Vorwahlblende

Carl Zeiss Jena reflex lens, M42 automatic (1961–c.1966):

  • Black-painted barrel with a silver aperture ring and a rubber focusing band: narrow and plain-textured on the first lenses of 1961, a band with large diamond shapes made alongside it; from about 1964 zebra-striped aperture and focusing rings, the focusing ring then metal (JAPB)
  • Automatic diaphragm worked from the camera through a stop-down pin at the rear, so no preset ring; a small lever near the mount on no. 6432060; 49 mm filter as on the presets

Carl Zeiss Jena reflex lens, Exakta preset (1957–c.1965):

  • The silver preset barrel of the M42 lens, with the Exakta bayonet at the rear in place of the thread
  • Listed in West Germany as 'Jena S. 1:4,0/135 mm BV' — the export name, with 49 E filter, four elements and 18.5° (Ihagee list of October 1958)

Carl Zeiss Jena reflex lens, Exakta automatic (1961–1969):

  • Exakta bayonet and an arm on the side of the barrel that sits over the camera's release, so that pressing it closes the diaphragm before the shutter fires; it takes a cable release (no. 8127519)
  • Black barrel with the plain textured band from 1961, zebra trim from about 1964 — the same barrel generations as the M42 automatic
  • Export lenses read S 1:4 f=135 and aus JENA on the front ring, without Sonnar or Carl Zeiss (no. 8129121)

Carl Zeiss Jena reflex lens, Praktina preset:

  • The silver preset barrel with the Praktina's breech-lock bayonet at the rear
  • Wolfen's lens: f/4–22, E49, focuses to 1.2 m on a scale that starts at 1.0 m, 94 mm long and 67 mm across, 400 g

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 Contax 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.
4876115–8437017
The reflex lenses, all in the Jena sequence. JAPB's lowest preset is 4876115, in the 1955–58 band of the table above; the Sonnar 3.5/135 begins at 8135333 in 1966, and the last f/4 JAPB found is 8437017, about 1969. Barrels overlap in the numbers as the prewar ones did: presets 6307394 and 6308336 lie within three thousand of an automatic, 6305936, and a diamond-grip lens, 6432060, lies below JAPB's lowest diamond number, 6539956. A number dates a reflex Sonnar to within a year or two and does not tell preset from automatic; the barrel does.
8127290, 8127519, 8129121
Three lenses within two thousand numbers of each other, about 1965 or 1966 (JAPB's earliest Sonnar 3.5/135, of 1966, is 8135333): the Praktina preset in the Wolfen museum, an Exakta zebra, and an export Exakta zebra engraved S 1:4 f=135. Numbers this close usually come from neighbouring lots, so the Praktina preset seems to have been built alongside the last Exakta automatics. Kröger's single lot of 900 non-Exakta lenses of the 1965 calculation might be where it belongs, but nothing published connects the two.

Specifications

Formula
Sonnar
Designed by
Ludwig Bertele — calculations of 8 October 1931 and 14 January 1937 (Kröger, from the Zeiss data sheets)
Construction
4 elements / 3 groups
Aperture range
f/4
Min. focus
1.5 m
Filter
40.5 mm (Carl Zeiss Jena, Oberkochen / Zeiss Opton) · 49 mm (Carl Zeiss Jena reflex lens, M42 preset (1957–c.1965), Carl Zeiss Jena reflex lens, M42 automatic (1961–c.1966), Carl Zeiss Jena reflex lens, Exakta preset (1957–c.1965), Carl Zeiss Jena reflex lens, Exakta automatic (1961–1969), Carl Zeiss Jena reflex lens, Praktina preset)
Years manufactured
1932–1969
Country
Germany
Original price
198 Mark for the preset reflex lens in the GDR from June 1960 (Kröger's transcription of the DDR price lists; the same price is on an original quiver label); DM 294 for the Exakta preset in Ihagee's West German list of October 1958. No price for the Contax lens is recorded here.

What reviewers say

Optical formula — Sonnar

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.

Bertele built it from the simplest form of his 1929 Sonnar patent: four elements in three groups, a single front lens, a thick cemented pair and a rear meniscus. Marco Kröger, who reproduces the Zeiss data sheets, dates the first production calculation to 8 October 1931 and notes how plain its glass was, ordinary borosilicate crown in both front positive elements. On 14 January 1937 Bertele recalculated the lens with every glass changed, phosphate crown and fluor crown at the front, and the layout untouched; the new calculation went into production in 1937. Kröger counts just under 6,000 lenses of the first calculation and about 83,000 of the second. The 1937 sheet gives a true focal length of 133 mm, a back focus of 62.5 mm and an optical length under 60 mm: a short lens for its focal length, and one with room behind it for a reflex mirror. Kröger calls the 1937 calculation an optimum, and a 1955 attempt to improve it a failure.

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.

Carl Zeiss Jena made the Contax lens again after the war, from 1947 (see the serial notes). When it stopped is less clear: JAPB, going by the numbers it found, ends Jena’s Contax 135 in 1949, while Ghisetti puts the last regular Contax-bayonet lenses of any kind from Jena in April 1955, a lot of 5cm f/1.5 Sonnars. The East German 35mm reflexes, the Exakta, the Praktica and from 1949 the Dresden Contax S line, had no Sonnar 135 in Jena’s catalogue. Their 135 was the Triotar, a triplet Jena had made for reflexes since 1938 and about half as long again as the Sonnar; before the war the Kine Exakta’s American importer listed a Sonnar 13.5cm only on special import order. Kröger’s reading is that the Sonnar’s origin decided it: it was a Zeiss Ikon design, worked out in Dresden and kept almost entirely for Zeiss Ikon’s cameras, while the lenses Jena made for other camera makers were mostly its own designs. He adds that the legal standing of the Zeiss Ikon licences, once the Zeiss foundation had moved west, may have counted after the war. The factory knew the Sonnar suited a reflex. Kröger shows a lens of 1949, from a lot of 600 made for the Contax, refitted with an Exakta bayonet, apparently at the works, its bayonet ring cut away so as not to hide the depth-of-field scale.

In 1957, Kröger writes, the Sonnar 4/135 was offered in the reflex mounts, not in a new calculation but in Bertele’s of 1937, and the Triotar was stopped the following year. JAPB, which dates lenses from close to a thousand photographed examples, puts the start in 1956. Ihagee’s West German Exakta list of November 1957 still has Jena’s 135 only as the Triotar; that of October 1958 has the Sonnar, as “Jena S.” at DM 294. In the GDR the preset cost 198 Mark from June 1960. The first reflex lenses were presets in brushed aluminium, with a preset ring and an aperture ring at the front, for the 42 mm thread of the Praktica and the Dresden Contax and Pentacon reflexes, for the Exakta bayonet and for the Praktina. They take 49 mm filters and focus to about 1.2 m, where the Contax lens takes 40.5 mm and stops at 1.5 m. Automatic lenses for M42 and the Exakta followed in 1961, in black-painted barrels: first with a narrow textured band on the focusing ring, alongside it a band with large diamonds, and from about 1964 the zebra trim. JAPB finds the optics unchanged from the presets. Lenses for Western markets dropped the Carl Zeiss name, which Jena could mostly not use there while Oberkochen disputed it, and the Sonnar name with it; they are engraved S 1:4 f=135 with Jena or aus JENA, on presets as well as automatics.

In the 42 mm thread the f/4 gave way from about 1966 to the Sonnar 3.5/135, a faster lens on the same layout and not on this page. In Exakta mount it went on. Kröger records that Jena recalculated the f/4 on 2 March 1965, the day before the calculation of the f/3.5 was finished, and built just under 22,000 of it until the summer of 1969, all but one lot of 900 for the Exakta. He cannot say why the slower lens was kept, and wonders whether it vignetted less behind the simple shutter of the Exa. Neither he nor JAPB says what the 1965 calculation changed, and JAPB’s drawings show no change, so the late Exakta lenses stay on this page. JAPB’s last f/4, a zebra, is no. 8437017.

For a buyer the barrel and the mount tell the version, and the serial number does not. A silver lens with two rings at the front is a preset of 1957–65, whatever the listing calls it; one has been offered as an “early silver version”. The M42 preset has a plain thread with no pin. The Praktina lens has that camera’s breech-lock bayonet and fits nothing else without an adapter. An Exakta automatic carries an arm on the side of the barrel that presses the camera’s release and closes the diaphragm on the way. The zebra f/3.5 looks almost the same as the zebra f/4, so read the front ring. A Contax lens is the one with the external bayonet and its own focusing helicoid, and on anything but a Contax or a Kiev it needs an adapter made for the outer bayonet.

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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

More sample photos elsewhere

These photographers keep all rights to their work — enjoy it at the source.

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 $140 across 28 fixed-price listings on 2026-11-02 (middle half $89–$220). Tracked since 2026-09-06, 12 days: down 39% from $220.

By day
DateMedianMiddle halfListings
2026-11-02$140$89–$22028
2026-10-30$140$89–$22028
2026-10-26$140$89–$22028
2026-10-19$140$89–$22028
2026-10-18$140$89–$22028
2026-10-17$140$89–$22028
2026-10-16$140$93–$22029
2026-10-15$220$140–$30016
2026-09-21$220$140–$25016
2026-09-18$220$180–$28017
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 2026-11-02. Links go to the shop or marketplace that carries the item.

Related: Sonnar 8.5cm f/2 · Jupiter-11 135mm f/4 · Triotar 135mm f/4 · Sonnar 180mm f/2.8 (Olympia-Sonnar)

Sources (24)

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.