Carl Zeiss
Zeiss is a German manufacturer of lenses and other optical systems, located in Oberkochen with an important subsidiary in Jena. Carl Zeiss is a subsidiary of the Carl Zeiss Foundation of which also Schott Glass located in Jena, is part.
Carl Zeiß (1816-1888) was an German optician who built precision optics for improved microscopes.
Innovations
- Tessar® lens: from Greek 'tessares' ('four') and patented in 1904, this lens was invented by Dr. Paul Rudolph and featured four glass elements. Tessars were original fixed focal length, typically normal lenses. Further development yielded longer focal length telephoto lenses, and in 2002 Kyocera produced the T4 Zoom 35mm camera, equipped with the 28-70mm Vario-Tessar® T* f/4.5-8.0 lens, the first zoom Tessar.
- T* coating: a multi-layered antireflective coating for lenses. Pioneered by Zeiss, the technology was then further expanded in a joint venture with Rollei to yield 'HFT' lenses, sold under the Rollei name. According to Zeiss, there is no detectable difference between the two, and that HFT was developed in response to the low ouput volume plant Zeiss was capable at the time.
Reputation
Now over 100 years old, Zeiss continues to be associated with high-quality (and therefore expensive) optical lenses. Zeiss lenses are generally thought to be elegant (the Tessar, for example), well-constructed (metal parts continue to feature dominantly, in an age of increasingly plastic components), yielding high quality images. Zeiss believes that its lenses are sharp "wide open" (i.e. operated at the maximum aperture, lenses commonly are sharpest at a few apertures, typically a range in the middle varying on format).
Zeiss licensing allows its technologies to be manufactured by third party companies and indeed a great many have done so, including Kyocera as previously mentioned, Hasselblad (a prominent name in its own right), Rollei, Sony and Alpa. Notably absent from this list are Canon and Nikon, who by and large produce their own lenses.
Zeiss Ikon
Until world war two another firm, named Zeiss Ikon, together with dozens of other brands and factories in Dresden represented an important part of the world´s largest camera production location. After the war, bringing a lot of destruction, these firms recovered soon (VEB Zeiss Ikon) and later were splitted and united but kept being well known for an enormous amount of world patents. Already before the war they invented the world´s first slr camera and the first minature camera with good pciture quality. After a total economic collapse following Germanies reunification they came back onto the market. Since the 1990s these firms developed to a broader technology network with several products like 3D-LCD screens and car industry products but they still produce cameras, PENTACON, PRAKTICA
