on Sept 16, 2015 22:55:39 GMT
After 40 years or so, you may be entitled to think you know everything there is to know about our Contax/Yashica range of cameras, lenses and accessories. I keep being challenged by new discoveries.
I'm always buying old Yashica, Zeiss and Contax brochures - especially those from the 1970s - that I have not seen before. A lovely 1978 Yashica lens brochure from Australia brought another image of the fabled ML 400mm f5.6, which drew some comments on this forum, and today I took delivery of a Zeiss lens brochure from 1977. I was glancing through it and spotted something completely new to me: there was a very different looking 60mm S-Planar 1:1 Macro lens.
I've attached 2 images - one from the brochure and one of the standard production lenses. They are very different in external appearance - the original design is very much more compact than the final version - 55mm filter vs 67mm on the S-Planar. What then really threw me a curveball was realising that the Zeiss 60mm C-Planar - a 1:2 macro lens - is identical externally to the original design for the S-Planar. I have always refused to buy the C-Planar as the Yashica ML 55mm 2.8 Macro lens is a better performer so I can't show you the comparison with the brochure image but the shape and overall dimensions of the lenses are almost identical.
I'm still learning...
