ZEISS: Camera Lens Technical Articles
ZEISS publishes a set of long-form technical papers on camera-lens optics through its Lenspire platform, gathered on an overview page. They are written by ZEISS optical staff — principally Dr. Hubert Nasse, with later papers by Dr. Vladan Blahnik and colleagues — and distributed as PDFs in English and German.
These are the most technical documents in this whole index. Rather than telling the story of one product, they explain how lenses are measured and why particular design families behave as they do, with MTF plots, cross-sections and prescription-level discussion. Three of them form an explicit series on the ZEISS lens names, and those map directly onto the design families in the Surface & Stop catalog.
The Papers
| Paper | Authors | Official PDF |
|---|---|---|
| How to read MTF curves? Part I | Hubert Nasse | Read at ZEISS |
| How to read MTF curves? Part II | Hubert Nasse | Read at ZEISS |
| Distortion | Bertram Hönlinger, Hubert Nasse | Read at ZEISS |
| Depth of Field and Bokeh | Hubert Nasse | Read at ZEISS |
| Lens names: Planar | Hubert Nasse | Read at ZEISS |
| Lens names: Tessar | Hubert Nasse | Read at ZEISS |
| Lens names: Distagon, Biogon and Hologon | Hubert Nasse | Read at ZEISS |
| About the irradiance and apertures of camera lenses | Vladan Blahnik | Read at ZEISS |
| Optical design of camera optics for mobile phones | Thomas Steinich, Vladan Blahnik | Read at ZEISS |
| T*-coating and reduction of reflections in lenses | Vladan Blahnik, Benjamin Voelker | Read at ZEISS |
Each paper is also published in German from the same overview page. The first four and the last three are general optical theory rather than accounts of particular lenses, so they carry no catalog column.
Lens Families in the Naming Papers
The three naming papers survey their families across many decades and variants rather than analyzing a single lens. The catalog entries below are the members of each family held by Surface & Stop; they are not the sole subject of the corresponding paper.
| Family | Paper | Surface & Stop |
|---|---|---|
| Planar | Lens names: Planar | Contarex Planar 55mm f/1.4 · Planar T* 50mm f/1.4 · Planar 80mm f/2.8 |
| Tessar | Lens names: Tessar | Tessar 50mm f/3.5 · Jena Tessar 50mm f/2.8 · Jena Tessar 144mm f/5.5 |
| Distagon | Lens names: Distagon, Biogon and Hologon | Distagon T* 25mm f/2.8 · Distagon T* 28mm f/2 · Distagon T* 35mm f/1.4 |
| Biogon | Lens names: Distagon, Biogon and Hologon | Biogon 21mm f/4.5 · Jena Biogon 35mm f/2.8 |
| Hologon | Lens names: Distagon, Biogon and Hologon | Hologon 15mm f/8 |
A Note on Access
The Lenspire site renders through JavaScript, so the overview page may appear blank to tools that do not execute scripts. The PDF links above are direct and do not depend on that page loading.
ZEISS also hosts a single corporate page of camera and cine lens milestones covering the Protar, Planar, Tessar, Sonnar, Topogon, Biogon and Distagon introductions. It is one page in a broader technology series rather than a lens collection of its own, so it is listed here as a source rather than indexed chapter by chapter.