Contarex lenses

Contarex lenses are a series of photographic camera lenses used by the Contarex camera, which use the Contarex bayonet lens mount. The first set of lenses were presented with the Contarex I at Photokina in 1958 and initially scheduled for delivery in the spring of 1959, but they were not made generally available in the United States until March 1960.

The series was discontinued after Zeiss Ikon ceased camera production in 1972, but there are still many used lenses available in the market. In addition, some of the lens designs were licensed to other manufacturers, who produced them under their own brands, including Asahi Optical (for Pentax K-mount SLRs), Rollei (for QBM SLRs in the Rolleiflex SL35 line), and Yashica (for the Contax SLR line). Their exemplary performance has led companies to make mount adapters to fit them to modern digital cameras.

Lenses
These are all the first-party lenses for the Contarex system; all but one (the PA-Curtagon) were designed and manufactured by Carl Zeiss. Noted Leica historian Erwin Puts obtained the Modulation Transfer Function curves for many of the lenses designed by Zeiss and published them on his website, noting "the special smoothness and depth of the Contarex lenses can be explained by these [MTF] curves. The characteristics of the Contarex lenses are reminiscent of the Hasselblad lenses. Stopped down a bit they exhibit a remarkable finesse of gradation and depth. They may not be the sharpest lenses ever, but the rendition of shape outlines and surface details is most pleasing and subtle like a poem." Marco Cavina compared two rare Contarex lenses (the S-Planar macro lens and Vario-Sonnar 40~120) in 2008 with newer counterparts made for the Contax SLRs built by Yashica/Kyocera, hailing the older lenses as providing "very beautiful and satisfactory results" while lamenting the awkward operation of the Contarex camera bodies.