A Short History of Fast Normal Lenses

Thanks. He was a physicist and he had created many things in his life. I used to show my students the German 10DM note which was dedicated to his inventions.
 
Thanks again, all, glad you like it.

Jamie Pillers said:
Can you say a bit about why no Voigtlander rangefinder lens shows up on these lists?
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The 40 I already had, Jamie. I just added Voigtlander Color Skopar, and the 1.5 and 1.1 Noktons. Even though the 1.5 is an aspherical, it can still be considered a back-extended Ultron, similar to 1.1 Nokton and Color Skopar. And the 50/2 and 3.5 Heliars didn't fit in my simplified concept (there are other 50mm lenses with more complicated double Gauss derivations). Attached the diagram of the aspherical Nokton.

5015Nokton-S.jpg
 
raid said:
Thanks. He was a physicist and he had created many things in his life. I used to show my students the German 10DM note which was dedicated to his inventions.
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Carl Friedrich Gauss was also a big mathematician, Raid. What few people realize is that he lived in the same time period as Augustin-Louis Cauchy and Évariste Galois, they knew and corresponded with each other, even while Galois was sitting in the Bastille. All three of them did huge contributions to field theory. An amazing time for science ...

Roland.
 
Cool! Thanks, Roland.
Jamie

ferider said:
The 40 I already had, Jamie. I just added Voigtlander Color Skopar, and the 1.5 and 1.1 Noktons. Even though the 1.5 is an aspherical, it can still be considered a back-extended Ultron, similar to 1.1 Nokton and Color Skopar. And the 50/2 and 3.5 Heliars didn't fit in my simplified concept (there are other 50mm lenses with more complicated double Gauss derivations). Attached the diagram of the aspherical Nokton.

5015Nokton-S.jpg
Click to expand...
 
Excellent work, Roland! Thanks for posting this. I particularly like the diagrams - a much better representation of the optics than a typical cross section.

Rob-F said:
Thanks for doing this! Somebody make this a sticky, immediately!
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Done!
 
Good overview for the 35mm world.

Most of the innovations in lens designs were before 35mm film. It's interesting that what is a fast lens in a long, large format is not that fast in a 50mm. The Petzval was the first fast, mathematically calculated lens design, invented in 1840 so the slow daguerreotype process would allow photographing live subjects. It reduced sitting time from about 1-3 minutes to about 30 seconds. It's F3.6 speed was seldom surpassed until the Cooke triplets about 50 years later. Some are even faster, about F3.1, which doesn't seem that fast until you consider we are talking 200mm, 300mm or longer lenses that cover huge pieces of film.

One earlier and even more important invention was by Dolland, who made nautical telescopes. In 1758 he invented a means of constructing doublet lenses by the combination of crown and flint glasses, which reduces chromatic aberration. These achromat telescope objectives are what Camera Obscura inventors started making "camera" lenses out of, then doubling them to make a double gauss. They had relatively few aberrations, but were very slow. The Daguerreotype and then Wetplate process was what drove the need for faster lenses, with fewer aberrations. Finally the Tessar came around, at F4.5 (in LF versions) it was fast enough, and very error-free.
 
Very few Petzvals were used in small format. Mostly in early cine movie cameras. I have an F1.9 Dallmeyer cine lens, 25mm. It's from the mid 1920s, when an F3.5 Elmar or F2.5 Hektor were considered fast enough. The problem is making a fast lens in such a small focal length (50mm). Angenieux finally did it in the 1950s, getting about F0.95 out of some of his designs. Then Canon and others got faster lenses too, but they always have edge aberrations or spherical aberration.
 
ferider said:
Carl Friedrich Gauss was also a big mathematician, Raid. What few people realize is that he lived in the same time period as Augustin-Louis Cauchy and Évariste Galois, they knew and corresponded with each other, even while Galois was sitting in the Bastille. All three of them did huge contributions to field theory. An amazing time for science ...

Roland.
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This is correct. We also have three scientists developing the Normal Distribution. Gauss was one of these three. De Moivre, Gauss, and Laplace.
 
Brilliant! There are some links to original CZJ lens blueprints in my sticky thread in the Members Only sub forum. If you don't already have these, knock yourself out.
Cheers
Brett
 
Done, Dominique, and thanks.

All, let me know if you have other good online references that you would like me to include.
 
thanks. Two comments to the above remarks. The Voigtländer ultron f,2 came as normel lens for the Pominent rangefinder and could be exchanged with the 1,5 vesion it was also built into the vitesssa ragefinders as wella as some of the pricier Vitos. I assume that 55mm gave space for a mirror to be used,>I am curious as to the structure of the Angenieux s21 normaal lens that came with the Alpas.


p.
 
Ran across this old thread while searching for some information about a couple of specific lenses. Terrific work! Thanks.
 
Thank you Roland, I found this very interesting and informative. (This is rare - things are often interesting and not terribly informative, or informative and not very interesting. Your contribution is both.)

But there is one question I have. In your section on the Double Gauss / Planar you go on to say "Today, most high-aperture normal lenses supplied with consumer cameras are based on this original Biotar design. The following is an incomplete list of classic normal lenses using a similar 6 elements in 4 groups configuration, where example pictures taken with the last two lenses can be found here."

Yet there is no other reference to Biotar in this section. Is this an error (did you mean double gauss?)or am I missing something?

regards and thanks again. Peter

EDIT; oh now I look at the schematic at the bottom of the post (the "family tree") and see that the biotar / planar are related and it is this you are referring to.
 
Fantastic article! I missed this somehow back in 2016...

ferider said:
Ultron Back Extension

The basic Ultron design was extended by adding an element to its back as first calculated by A.W. Tronnier in 1932. This design became very popular for fast 50mm lenses in the 70s. One of the most successful such design was patented by Glatzel and Behrens [EXTULTRON] and used for the Zeiss Planar 50mm f/1.4 lens, used among others for the Rolleiflex SL35 system.

ZeissPlanar5014-measured-S.jpg

The following is an incomplete list of classic normal lenses using a similar 7 elements in 5 groups configuration, where example pictures taken with the last five lenses can be found here.

  • Zeiss Planar (C/Y) 50mm f/1.7
  • Pentax (FA) 43mm f/1.9
  • Pentax (A) 50mm f/1.2
  • Canon (EF) 50mm f/1.4
  • Yashica 50mm f/1.4 and 55mm f/1.2
  • Porst 55mm f/1.2
  • Zenitar 50mm f/1.4
  • Voigtlander 50mm f/2.5 Color Skopar
  • Voigtlander VM 50mm f/1.1
  • Minolta AF 50mm f/1.4
  • Olympus OM Zuiko 50mm f/1.4
  • Olympus OM Zuiko 50mm f/1.2
    [*] Pentax-M SMC 50mm f/1.4
  • Voigtlander 50mm f/1.5 ASPH (LTM and VM)
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FWIW every Pentax 50/f1.4 from the 7-element Super Takumar (introduced 1965) to the FA (introduced 1991, still on the market) used the same 7/5 design.

So...
- Super Takumar 50/f1.4
- Super-Multi-Coated Takumar 50/f1.4
- SMC Takumar 50/f1.4
- SMC Pentax 50/f1.4
- SMC Pentax-M 50/f1.4
- SMC Pentax-A 50/f1.4
- SMC Pentax-F 50/f1.4
- SMC Pentax-FA 50/f1.4
 
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