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

Sonnar 8.5cm f/2

Carl Zeiss · Contax RF · 1932 · Sonnar

Also known as: Zeiss Sonnar 85mm f/2 · Sonnar 8.5cm f2

Variants & identification

Variant Mount Years Serial ranges Production
Carl Zeiss Jena, black and nickel Contax RF 1932–1936 from 1430301 — the first version, 1933, black paint and nickel over brass, no filter thread, large lettering, spanner notches in the front ring, f/16 minimum; perhaps only 200 lenses, with a few earlier numbers built for promotion
from 1454101 — the second version, still 1933, smaller engraving and no spanner notches
somewhere in the 15xxxxx block — the 1934 version, the knurled ring above the aperture scale narrowed from 4mm to 3mm 		Disputed for the first version: "perhaps only 200 lenses" (Pacific Rim Camera) against "probabilmente 900/1100 esemplari" (Ghisetti). See the table notes.
Carl Zeiss Jena, chrome Contax RF 1936–1945 from about 1631401 — heavy chrome finish to match the chrome Contax II, with a 49mm filter thread added at the nose, 1936
from about 2232500 — minimum aperture changed to f/22
2851501–2851600 — a batch exported to Sweden in 1936-style chrome-over-brass barrels, probably the last chrome-over-brass 85s before the wartime alloys 		No figure published
Oberkochen / Zeiss Opton Contax RF 1950–1961 540101–541500, 658101–658600, 839401–840200 and 1128601–1129000 — the Zeiss-Opton batches, 2,100 lenses in all, revised to seven elements in three groups, aluminium barrel, T-coated, 24-blade double diaphragm
1128601–1128800, 1129301–1130500 and 1475601–1475700 — the batches engraved Carl Zeiss, 1,500 lenses, with the barrel in front of the aperture ring made in one piece instead of two 		2,100 marked Zeiss-Opton and 1,500 marked Carl Zeiss. Pacific Rim Camera and Ghisetti give the same two figures independently.
  1. The serial blocks in the variant table come from Pacific Rim Camera's version-by-version account of the 85/2, which also gives production totals the variant table does not: about 200 lenses of the first 1933 version, 3,000 postwar Jena, 2,100 Zeiss-Opton and 1,500 engraved Carl Zeiss. A second, independent version-by-version account exists — Pierpaolo Ghisetti's, published on marcocavina.com in 2010 — and the two agree on the postwar West German figures and disagree on almost everything prewar. Both are set out below.
  2. Where the two accounts agree. Ghisetti gives the Zeiss-Opton production as four batches from 540,001 to 1,129,000 totalling 2,100 lenses, and the Carl Zeiss production as 1,500 lenses from 1,128,601 to 1,475,700 — the same totals and the same outer serial bounds as Pacific Rim Camera, reached independently. He also confirms the postwar redesign to seven elements in three groups, the aluminium barrel and the double diaphragm. The overlap at 1,128,601, where a Zeiss-Opton block and a Carl Zeiss block share a starting number, appears in both accounts and is explained in neither.
  3. Where they disagree, and it is not small. Ghisetti puts the start of production in May 1933 at 1,430,351 where Pacific Rim Camera gives 1,430,301, and the chrome version in April 1936 at 1,799,701 where Pacific Rim Camera gives about 1,631,401. On the first version Pacific Rim Camera says "perhaps only 200" lenses and Ghisetti "probabilmente 900/1100 esemplari" — a fivefold difference in the rarest version of the lens. On the postwar Jena production Pacific Rim Camera counts 3,000 lenses from 1946, while Ghisetti counts 8,502 running from December 1945 at 2,839,301 to August 1949 at 3,200,500. Neither writer shows his working, and no third account was found that would settle any of it.
  4. Ghisetti counts 22 diaphragm blades on the postwar double diaphragm where Pacific Rim Camera gives 24. Both are recorded; the number is countable on any given lens and a reader with one in hand can settle it for that example.
  5. Production totals for the whole design, from Ghisetti and found nowhere else: 5,623 lenses from Carl Zeiss Jena up to 1941, 8,502 from Carl Zeiss Jena after the war, 2,100 Zeiss-Opton and 1,500 Carl Zeiss, plus 905 built between 1935 and 1938 in Contaflex mount and two built in 1933 in Leica thread — 17,725 Contax-bayonet Sonnars in all. He warns the true figure is a little lower, because in 1941 part of a 600-lens batch was diverted to fit Arriflex cine cameras.
  6. Two routes by which an 85mm Sonnar came to wear a 39×1 Leica thread, both from Ghisetti and both unquantified. Lenses were taken from the Arriflex batches and rethreaded between 1941 and December 1945; and in 1948, by order of the SMAD — the Soviet military administration in occupied Germany — lenses from a batch of 300 were converted after the fact to 39×1 to be shipped east on reparations account and fitted to FED and Zorki bodies. A screw-mount 8.5cm Sonnar is therefore neither a fake nor a catalogue item; it is a converted one, and the number converted is not recorded.
  7. Ghisetti's account of Zeiss serial numbers, written separately from his account of this lens, is a warning against reading any of the blocks above too closely. Batches were left free and allotted later; black-and-nickel production overlapped the new chrome series in the mid-1930s; and between 1940 and 1945 the numbering "si accavallano senza apparente logica" — 1944 batches sit inside 1940 numbers, 1941 batches carry higher numbers than 1945 ones, and the range 2,600,000 to 2,700,000 is, in his words, almost always unreliable for identifying the year. The sequence steadies again in early 1946.
  8. The Zeiss-Opton and Carl Zeiss batch lists overlap in the source: 1128601–1129000 is given as a Zeiss-Opton batch and 1128601–1128800 as a Carl Zeiss batch. Both are recorded here as printed; the overlap is not explained.
  9. Pacific Rim Camera's version years and the camera-wiki serial table do not always agree. 1,430,301, where it puts the start of 1933 production, falls between camera-wiki's 1932 band (ending 1,389,279) and its 1933 band (opening 1,436,671); 1,631,401, called 1936, sits inside camera-wiki's 1935 band; and 2,232,500, called later 1936, sits between camera-wiki's 1937 and 1938 bands. Read as a batch-order sequence rather than a calendar, both can be true — see the note on block allotment above.
  10. The earliest Zeiss-Opton batch, 540101–541500, falls inside the Oberkochen band camera-wiki dates 1951–1953, while Pacific Rim Camera dates the Zeiss-Opton 85/2 to 1950. Both are recorded rather than reconciled.
How to tell them apart (expand)
  • Mounts on the EXTERNAL bayonet and has its own focusing ring, unlike the standard lenses

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. camera-wiki's table, taken from Wilkinson and Glanfield's A Lens Collector's Vade Mecum, runs the Jena sequence from 137,418 in 1912 to about 2,900,000 in 1942; Craig Camera publishes a near-identical list.
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. A six-figure number on a Zeiss-Opton or Oberkochen barrel is therefore early 1950s, not 1920s.
any number near a year boundary
Blocks were allotted to production in sequence, but batches were not always finished in block order, so the published year ranges overlap — 1935 runs to 1,752,303 while 1936 opens at 1,674,882 — and a serial places a lens within a year or two rather than to a month. Pentacon Six sets out the mechanism and points to Hartmut Thiele's Fabrikationsbuch Photooptik, a transcription of the factory books, for batch-level dates.
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.
3052801–3053100, 3060901–3061000, 3108201–3108400, 3199301–3200000, 3207901–3209600
Carl Zeiss Jena's postwar batches, 3,000 lenses in all from 1946 on Pacific Rim Camera's count, in an alloy barrel and T-coated but optically the prewar design. Ghisetti counts the same production quite differently: 8,502 lenses running from December 1945 at 2,839,301 to August 1949 at 3,200,500, weighing 380 g, with a red T, a black filter ring and a characteristic recess in the barrel above the bayonet, focusing to 1.2 m. Both counts are recorded; they are not reconciled. The Jena barrel has a groove between the body of the barrel and the mount that the Zeiss-Opton lens lacks. These are East German lenses, not the Oberkochen variant in the table above, which the entry does not list as a variant.

Specifications

Formula
Sonnar
Designed by
Ludwig Bertele — optical design
Construction
6 elements / 3 groups
Aperture range
f/2
Weight
615 g
Filter
51 mm
Years manufactured
1932–1961
Country
Germany
Original price
132,000 lire (Italy, 1953) — twice the 63,000 lire of the 8.5cm f/4 Triotar

What reviewers say

History

The 8.5cm Sonnar is the lens the Summarex was built to answer. Through the 1930s Zeiss offered a fast portrait lens on a camera with a 90mm rangefinder base — the combination that makes f/2 at 85mm actually focusable — and Leitz had nothing equivalent until 1949, when it produced the Summarex at f/1.5 in a barrel so large that the camera looks like an accessory.

Being a long lens, it mounts on the Contax’s external bayonet and carries its own focusing ring, where the standard 50mm lenses have none and are driven by the wheel on the camera body. The two-bayonet arrangement is the mount’s oddest feature and the reason a Contax lens set looks so unlike a Leica one.

It ran from 1932 to 1961 in Jena black-and-nickel, Jena chrome, and postwar Oberkochen forms, and its design went east in 1945 to become the Jupiter-9.

The design did not stay put in its own mount either. Pierpaolo Ghisetti records that in 1941 lenses were pulled out of a 600-piece batch to be fitted to Arriflex cine cameras, and that some of those were rethreaded to 39×1 between then and December 1945; then in 1948 the Soviet military administration ordered lenses from a batch of 300 converted to the same thread and sent east on reparations account, to be screwed into FED and Zorki bodies. Neither quantity was recorded. An 8.5cm Sonnar in Leica thread is therefore usually a real Zeiss lens that has been through one of those two doors.

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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 8.5cm f/2? We'd love to feature it (with credit).

Live listings

Asking price, USD: a median of $500 across 8 fixed-price listings on 2026-09-11 (middle half $400–$1,500). Tracked since 2026-09-06, 2 days: unchanged from $500.

By day
DateMedianMiddle halfListings
2026-09-11$500$400–$1,5008
2026-09-06$500$400–$1,5008

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: Biotar 7.5cm f/1.5 · Jupiter-9 85mm f/2 · Sonnar 13.5cm f/4 · Sonnar 5cm f/1.5 · Summarex 8.5cm f/1.5 · Triotar 8.5cm f/4

Sources (9)

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.