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

Tessar 5cm f/3.5

Carl Zeiss Β· Contax RF Β· 1932 Β· Tessar

Also known as: Zeiss Tessar 50mm f/3.5 Β· Tessar 5cm f3.5

Variants & identification

Variant Mount Years Serial ranges Production
Carl Zeiss Jena, collapsible Contax RF 1932–1945 1364483–2900000 β€” the 1932 to 1942 span of the company-wide Carl Zeiss year table; prewar and wartime Jena numbers stay below 3000000
from 1270001 β€” Ghisetti's first batch, built December 1930: on his reading of the Zeiss registers the Tessar 5cm f/3,5 was the first lens ever made in the Contax bayonet, ahead of the camera's release
up to about 1600000 β€” where Ghisetti puts the end of the black-and-nickel finish; every lens of this period is marked Carl Zeiss Jena
from 1403042 β€” Pacific Rim Camera's first chrome Tessar, the finish changed in 1936 to match the Contax II 		No figure published
Oberkochen, rigid Contax RF 1950–1961 10000–3000000 β€” the Carl Zeiss Oberkochen sequence, which restarts low after the war and reaches 3000000 only in 1961 About 1,500 marked Zeiss-Opton from 1951 and about 4,500 engraved Carl Zeiss from 1953 (Pacific Rim Camera)
Tessar 50mm f/3.5 macro Contax RF 1950–1961 10000–3000000 β€” the same Oberkochen sequence as the rigid Tessar; no published list separates the two No figure published
  1. No per-model serial list has been published for the Contax Tessar 5cm f/3.5 in any source consulted online. The batch-level record exists in print: Hartmut Thiele's Fabrikationsbuch Photooptik II lists Carl Zeiss Jena photographic optics 1927–1991 by type, with batch quantities and "Nr. von / bis" serial columns. It was not consulted for this entry.
  2. Copies of the Carl Zeiss year table disagree in their transcription. Camera-wiki opens 1912 at 137418, craigcamera.com at 173418; camera-wiki gives 1914 as 249886–282739 and 1924 as 578297–631501, where craigcamera gives 252739 and 631869–; craigcamera records 1925 as 652230–681743 against camera-wiki's 631500–648500, and marks 1916 and 1940 unknown where camera-wiki supplies figures. The 1930s brackets that matter to this lens agree in both.
  3. Wartime and immediate postwar numbers are the least reliable part of the table: batches were numbered from blocks reserved earlier, so some 1944 work carries numbers set aside for 1940 and some 1941 lenses number higher than 1945 ones. The published table stops at 1942, and no block consulted covers 1943 to 1945.
  4. Camera-wiki's Contax lens list includes a postwar Carl Zeiss Jena rigid Tessar 50mm f/3.5 in an alloy mount, an East German lens that the variant list here does not carry. Its serials fall above 3000000 and it is identified by the red T and the light alloy barrel.
  5. The date this lens first appeared is given three ways, and no source consulted argues for its own figure against the others. This entry and camera-wiki open it with the Contax I in 1932; Pacific Rim Camera dates the first version, black face on a nickel body, to 1931; Ghisetti dates the first batch to December 1930 at serial 1,270,001 and calls it the first lens ever built in the Contax bayonet. A production date and a release date would account for most of the spread, but no source consulted says so.
  6. Camera-wiki's macro Tessar and Pacific Rim Camera's close-up Tessar may or may not be the same lens. Camera-wiki lists a Tessar 50mm f/3.5 macro among the Oberkochen lenses, which is where the variant table above puts it; Pacific Rim Camera instead describes a 1947 version made for the Contaprox close-up device, and says only its optics were made at Jena. No source consulted lists both, and none gives a serial range for either.
  7. Ghisetti reaches the wartime warning above from the factory registers rather than from the published year table, and lands in the same place: lots of 1944 sit inside the numbers set aside for 1940, many 1941 lots carry higher numbers than 1945 lots, and the band from 2,600,000 to 2,700,000 is "quasi sempre inaffidabile" for fixing a year. He puts the return to an orderly sequence in the first months of 1946.
  8. The Zeiss-Opton to Carl Zeiss changeover is published at two different numbers, on two different lenses, and at neither on this one. Pacific Rim Camera puts it at 1164801 on the 50mm f/1.5 Sonnar; Ghisetti writes that Carl Zeiss-marked Sonnars officially began only at 1,256,001, and offers a Sonnar 50mm f/2 numbered 824,840 already engraved Carl Zeiss as evidence that the Oberkochen registers contradict themselves. No source consulted gives a changeover number for the Tessar.
  9. Ghisetti ends the lens later than the variant table does. Zeiss Ikon closed the Contax camera line in 1960 but kept supplying lenses until 1962, and the Zeiss Ikon catalogues of 1961–62 still give the Contax system five pages and still list eight lenses from 21mm to 135mm.
  10. Pacific Rim Camera's version history: first Contax Tessar 5cm f/3.5s built in 1931 with a black face and nickel body; an all-nickel bright-faced redesign in 1932; chrome from 1936 to match the Contax II, first recorded serial 1403042, with some black-and-nickel parts assembled under serials over 3,000,000; postwar Jena lenses of 1945–50 in aluminium with an engraved black ring, coated examples from serial 3009301 and uncoated ones without the ring; Zeiss-Opton optics from 1950; a rigid 40.5 mm-filter lens from 1951 in about 1,500, and about 4,500 engraved Carl Zeiss from 1953. A Contaprox close-up version of 1947 used Jena optics only.
How to tell them apart (expand)
  • The cheapest standard lens in the Contax range, and the oldest design in it

Carl Zeiss Jena, collapsible:

  • Collapsible barrel; black and nickel, then chrome

Tessar 50mm f/3.5 macro:

  • A dedicated close-focusing version, listed separately by camera-wiki

Serial-range notes

the whole Carl Zeiss sequence
THE RULE. Carl Zeiss numbered every lens it made in one continuous sequence, whatever the type, so a Tessar is dated from the company-wide serial/year table and not from a list for this model. Find the number on the front bezel and read it off the table: 1932 = 1364483–1389279, 1933 = 1436671–1456003, 1934 = 1500474–1590000, 1935 = 1615764–1752303, 1936 = 1674882–1942806, 1937 = 1930150–2219775, 1938 = 2267991–2527984, 1939 = 2527999–2651211, 1940 = 2652000–2678000, 1941 = 2678326–2790346, 1942 = 2800000–2900000 (camera-wiki, after Wilkinson and Glanfield; craigcamera.com publishes the same table). The brackets overlap because Zeiss allocated blocks in advance and worked through them out of order, so a number that falls in two years is ambiguous by the table alone.
above 3000000, versus 10000 upward
After 1945 the sequence forks and the same number means two different decades depending on which factory made the lens. Carl Zeiss Jena in the East resumed above 3000000 β€” Pacific Rim Camera puts the first postwar Jena lenses "over 3000000" β€” and ran 3000000–3200000 for 1945–49, 3200000–3470000 for 1949–52, 3470000–4000000 for 1952–55, then a million a three-year block to 10000000 by 1975. Carl Zeiss Oberkochen in the West started again from 10000: 10000–500000 for 1946–51, 500000–1100000 for 1951–53, 1100000–2600000 for 1953–59, 2600000–3000000 for 1959–61. A rigid Contax Tessar numbered in the hundreds of thousands is therefore West German and early 1950s, not prewar Jena.
the barrel engraving, before the number
On the postwar rigid Tessar the marking dates the lens faster than the number does. Zeiss Oberkochen sold under the Zeiss-Opton name until the trademark dispute with Jena was settled around 1953, and as Carl Zeiss after it; Pacific Rim Camera puts the changeover on the 50mm f/1.5 Sonnar at serial 1164801, which falls at the start of camera-wiki's 1100000–2600000 block for 1953–59. Camera-wiki notes that both markings occur across the Oberkochen Contax range.
a letter followed by five digits
Not a lens number at all. Zeiss Ikon numbered CAMERAS in a separate sequence β€” one letter and five digits, a new letter every 99,999 β€” so a Contax body reading B21882 and a Tessar reading 1863717 are two unrelated series that happen to sit on the same camera.
2970000–3009301, on a postwar Jena barrel
The published exception to the rule above, and the two sources that state it disagree. Pierpaolo Ghisetti, working from the Zeiss registers, writes that postwar Carl Zeiss Jena numbers generally begin at 3,000,000 but that the Tessar 5cm f/3,5 is one of two exceptions and starts at 2,970,000 β€” the other being the Sonnar 5cm f/2 at 2,842,301. Pacific Rim Camera instead puts the resumed Jena Tessar at 3009301, in an aluminium barrel with a black engraved line on the face, some of them uncoated. An aluminium-barrelled Tessar numbered in the high 2.9 millions is therefore not necessarily a wartime lens. Ghisetti adds that the first lens Carl Zeiss Jena ever numbered 3,000,001 was itself a 5cm f/3,5, of March 1947, and that it carried an Exakta mount rather than a Contax bayonet.

Specifications

Formula
Tessar
Designed by
Paul Rudolph β€” optical design of the Tessar, 1902
Construction
4 elements / 3 groups
Aperture range
f/3.5
Filter
42 mm
Years manufactured
1932–1961
Country
Germany

What reviewers say

History

The Tessar was already thirty years old when the Contax appeared: Paul Rudolph designed it for Zeiss in 1902, four elements in three groups, and it became the most-copied lens arrangement in history. Leitz’s Elmar is a Tessar variant; so is the Soviet Industar; so is a large fraction of everything made anywhere between the wars.

On the Contax it is the economy standard lens, sold beside the f/2 and f/1.5 Sonnars for photographers who did not need the speed. Prewar examples collapse into the body; the postwar Oberkochen version is rigid, and Zeiss also listed a dedicated macro version.

Expand Collapse

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 β€” but no human wrote these sentences.

Example photos

Sample photo wanted β€” shot with a Tessar 5cm f/3.5? We'd love to feature it (with credit).

Live listings

Asking price, USD: a median of $200 across 15 fixed-price listings on 2026-09-11 (middle half $99–$250). Tracked since 2026-09-06, 2 days: up 10% from $180.

By day
DateMedianMiddle halfListings
2026-09-11$200$99–$25015
2026-09-06$180$99–$25014

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: Elmar 5cm f/3.5 Β· Sonnar 5cm f/2 Β· Tessar 2.8cm f/8

Sources (10)

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 β€” corrections, serials and sample photos are all worth having.