Glass Bodies a variant-level encyclopedia of vintage lenses and cameras by iwillpat

Sonnar 5cm f/1.5

Carl Zeiss · Contax RF · 1932 · Sonnar

single source, unconfirmed

Also known as: Zeiss Sonnar 50mm f/1.5 · Sonnar 5cm f1.5 · Zeiss Opton Sonnar 50/1.5 · ゾナー 50mm F1.5

Variants & identification

Variant Mount Years Serial ranges Production
Carl Zeiss Jena, black and nickel Contax RF 1932–1936 roughly 1420900–1628000 — Pacific Rim Camera's second type, of 1934, told apart by a minimum aperture of f/11 where the 1932 lens stopped at f/8
up to about 1730900 — the 1935 type: aperture ring moved to the nose with two finger grips, f/16 minimum, 40.5mm filter thread, barrel in mixed black paint, nickel and chrome 		No figure published
Carl Zeiss Jena, chrome Contax RF 1936–1945 up to about 2800000 — the all-chrome prewar type, the commonest of them, introduced late in 1935 No figure published
Carl Zeiss Oberkochen / Zeiss Opton Contax RF 1950–1961 from 1164801 — the final type, of 1953, engraved Carl Zeiss rather than Zeiss-Opton, minimum aperture back to f/16 (Pacific Rim Camera) No figure published
  1. The published Jena year table stops at 1942, around 2,900,000. Numbers between there and the 3,000,000 at which postwar Jena production resumes fall in a gap no consulted table covers, so wartime lenses of 1943–45 cannot be dated from the running number alone.
  2. Pacific Rim Camera dates the first Zeiss-Opton 50/1.5 to 1950 and the Carl Zeiss engraving to 1953, numbering from 1164801. The Oberkochen table puts 1,164,801 inside the 1,100,000–2,600,000 band it dates 1953–1959, so the two agree.
  3. The two published Jena tables agree closely across this lens's prewar life but differ at the edges: camera-wiki gives 1940 as 2,652,000–2,678,000 where Craig Camera leaves 1940 blank, and camera-wiki opens 1942 at 2,800,000 where Craig Camera opens it at 2,799,599.
  4. The variant table above is still one source deep, and the search for a second came back empty. Every serial breakpoint in it — f/8 in 1932, f/11 from 1934 at roughly 1420900–1628000, the nose-mounted aperture ring and f/16 from 1935 up to about 1730900, all-chrome to about 2800000, and 1164801 for the 1953 Carl Zeiss engraving — comes from Pacific Rim Camera's page on this lens and from nowhere else. Pacific Rim publishes no source of its own for the figures and gives no factory reference. Checked and found silent on the question: Early Photography, the Kievaholic Klub, USSRPhoto and Pacific Rim's own Contax body pages. Camera-wiki refused connections when this check was run (2026-09-04). The single-source flag stays set for this reason: the year table below is well corroborated, the variant breakdown is not.
  5. And one independent example contradicts it. Early Photography's Contax III, body E9797, carries a 5cm f/1.5 Sonnar numbered 2036765, which that page dates to 1937 and describes as having an "iris diaphragm to f11". Pacific Rim's scheme confines the f/11 minimum aperture to the second type of 1934, serials roughly 1420900–1628000, and has the minimum at f/16 from 1935 onward. A 1937 number stopping at f/11 fits neither. Either the minimum aperture is not the clean dating marker Pacific Rim makes of it, or one of the two records is wrong about this lens. No third account was found to break the tie, so both readings are left standing.
  6. A manufacturer's document does bear on one half of it. Zeiss Ikon's Contax price list of 15 February 1956 (CAM-617) carries a specification table for the ten Contax bayonet lenses with a "Smallest Aperture" column, and the entry for "Sonnar f/1.5 50mm." reads f/16 — the only f/16 in the table, every other lens from the 21mm Biogon to the 135mm Sonnar being given as f/22. So the f/16 minimum is a real and distinctive characteristic of this lens on the maker's own account, and not an artifact of Pacific Rim Camera's reading. What the table cannot do is date the change: it describes the postwar lens for the Contax IIa and IIIa, and says nothing about what a 1937 barrel was marked. The Early Photography example stands unexplained, and the minimum aperture is still not safe to date a prewar lens by.
  7. What a second source does confirm is the Carl Zeiss year table, tested against dated lenses rather than against another table. Early Photography's Contax entries list six lenses with independent dates: an 8.5cm Sonnar 1764721 given as c. 1936, against a 1936 band of 1,674,882–1,942,806; a 5cm f/1.5 Sonnar 2036765 given as 1937, against 1,930,150–2,219,775; a 3.5cm Orthometer 2392289 and a 3.5cm Biogon 2268072 both given as 1938, against 2,267,991–2,527,984. All four fall where the table puts them. A 2.8cm Tessar numbered 2267543, also given as 1938, falls just below the 1938 band and above the 1937 one — in the gap between published blocks, which is exactly the overlap the note above warns about.
  8. Pacific Rim Camera also records wartime and early postwar variations this entry does not list as variants, and they too have no second source: an aluminium aperture ring on a nickel-plated barrel in 1941; a black filter ring, and separately an all-aluminium barrel, in 1942; a chrome lens without the finger grips in 1943. On the Oberkochen side it reports a double set of aperture blades and a new optical design from 1950, a black filter ring from 1951, and a small 1952 batch stopping down to f/22.
How to tell them apart (expand)
  • Rigid barrel in every version — this lens never collapsed
  • The mount has no focusing ring: standard Contax lenses focus by the wheel on the camera body

Carl Zeiss Jena, black and nickel:

  • Marked Carl Zeiss Jena; black paint with nickel fittings; rigid barrel

Carl Zeiss Jena, chrome:

  • Chrome, for the Contax II and III

Carl Zeiss Oberkochen / Zeiss Opton:

  • Marked Zeiss Opton or Carl Zeiss, for the Contax IIa and IIIa

Serial-range notes

the whole number
How to date one. Carl Zeiss drew every photographic lens number from a single running sequence covering all models at once, so a Zeiss lens is dated by reading its number off a serial/year table rather than by counting within its own type — there is no per-model list of the Leitz kind. The table, taken from Wilkinson and Glanfield's A Lens Collector's Vade Mecum, runs the Jena sequence from 173,418 in 1912 to about 2,900,000 in 1942; camera-wiki and Craig Camera publish near-identical copies of it. The 1912 opening is given here as Craig Camera and the Leica Contax blog print it. Camera-wiki transposes it to 137,418, which the Vade Mecum's own quantity column rules out — the blog's copy of the 1912 row reads "173,418 - 200,520 27,102", and only the first reading subtracts to the published 27,102.
1364483–2900000
The Jena year boundaries that bracket this lens's prewar production, from camera-wiki: 1932 = 1,364,483–1,389,279; 1933 = 1,436,671–1,456,003; 1934 = 1,500,474–1,590,000; 1935 = 1,615,764–1,752,303; 1936 = 1,674,882–1,942,806; 1937 = 1,930,150–2,219,775; 1938 = 2,267,991–2,527,984; 1939 = 2,527,999–2,651,211; 1940 = 2,652,000–2,678,000; 1941 = 2,678,326–2,790,346; 1942 = 2,800,000–2,900,000.
above 3000000 (Jena) against 10000–3000000 (Oberkochen)
After 1945 the sequence forks, and the same figure means two different decades. Carl Zeiss Jena in the East carried the old numbers on from 3,000,000 — 3,000,000–3,200,000 = 1945–49, 3,200,000–3,470,000 = 1949–52, 3,470,000–4,000,000 = 1952–55, 4,000,000–5,000,000 = 1955–58, 5,000,000–6,000,000 = 1958–61. Carl Zeiss Oberkochen in the West began a fresh sequence at 10,000 in 1946 — 10,000–500,000 = 1946–51, 500,000–1,100,000 = 1951–53, 1,100,000–2,600,000 = 1953–59, 2,600,000–3,000,000 = 1959–61. A six-figure number on a Zeiss-Opton or Oberkochen barrel is therefore early 1950s, not 1920s.
any number near a year boundary
Blocks were allotted to production in sequence, but batches were not always finished in block order, so the published year ranges overlap — 1935 runs to 1,752,303 while 1936 opens at 1,674,882 — and a serial places a lens within a year or two rather than to a month. Pentacon Six sets out the mechanism and points to Hartmut Thiele's Fabrikationsbuch Photooptik, a transcription of the factory books, for batch-level dates.
a letter followed by five digits
Not a lens number at all. That is the Zeiss Ikon CAMERA sequence, inherited from ICA in 1909, which rolls to the next letter at 99,999, reached Z in 1936 and restarted at A. A Contax body number and a Zeiss lens number belong to separate schemes and must never be read against the same table.
about 2520300 onwards
Coating begins on the all-chrome prewar lens at about this number, applied inconsistently at first; prewar numbers run up to about 2,800,000 (Pacific Rim Camera).
above 3000000
The first postwar Jena 50/1.5s carry numbers over 3,000,000 — earliest in aluminium, then chrome-plated brass. These are East German lenses, a separate line from the Oberkochen variant in the table above, which the entry does not list as a variant.

Specifications

Formula
Sonnar
Designed by
Ludwig Bertele — optical design, 1932
Aperture range
f/1.5
Filter
40.5 mm
Years manufactured
1932–1961
Country
Germany

What reviewers say

History

The Sonnar is why the Contax mattered. Ludwig Bertele derived it in 1932 from his own Ernostar by adding an element and removing an air-spaced group, and that second change is the important one: every air-to-glass surface in an uncoated lens scatters light, and the Sonnar has fewer of them than any competing fast design. In 1932, before lens coating existed, that meant contrast where a double-Gauss of the same speed gave veiling flare.

At f/1.5 it was faster than anything Leitz sold — the fast Leica lens of 1932 was the f/2.5 Hektor, and the standard one an f/3.5 Elmar — and photographers who wanted to work in poor light bought a Contax to get it.

It has no focusing ring. Standard lenses on a Contax mount into the internal bayonet and are focused by a wheel on the camera body, which drives a helical built into the camera rather than the lens. That is why a Contax standard lens looks unusually compact and why it must be set to infinity before it is mounted or removed.

The lens was made in Jena in black and nickel for the Contax I, in chrome for the II and III, and after the war in Oberkochen — marked Zeiss Opton or Carl Zeiss — for the IIa and IIIa. Both postwar factories were Carl Zeiss, on opposite sides of a border.

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This history is AI-written, from the sources listed at the foot of the page. Where the record is silent it says so rather than filling the gap — but no human wrote these sentences.

Example photos

Sample photo wanted — shot with a Sonnar 5cm f/1.5? We'd love to feature it (with credit).

Live listings

Asking price, USD: a median of $330 across 43 fixed-price listings on 2026-10-19 (middle half $250–$450). Tracked since 2026-09-06, 9 days: down 18% from $400.

By day
DateMedianMiddle halfListings
2026-10-19$330$250–$45043
2026-10-18$330$250–$46044
2026-10-17$330$250–$46044
2026-10-16$330$240–$43043
2026-10-15$320$220–$50036
2026-09-21$350$240–$50027
2026-09-18$340$250–$55029
2026-09-11$360$190–$70028
2026-09-06$400$230–$90029

Asking prices from the listings scanned, not sales; junk-flagged rows and auction lots excluded; other currencies are not converted.

Show 68 more listings

Buying from Yahoo! Auctions outside Japan. It is a domestic marketplace: sellers ship within Japan, and most will not register an overseas buyer. A proxy service bids on your behalf, receives the item and forwards it, for a fee and a wait. Buyee, Jauce and ZenMarket each accept a Yahoo auction number directly. Listed alphabetically for information — none is recommended over another, and none of these is an affiliate link.

Listings updated 2026-10-19. Links go to the shop or marketplace that carries the item.

Related: Jupiter-3 50mm f/1.5 · Sonnar 5cm f/2 · Sonnar 8.5cm f/2

Sources (11)

Every page here is assembled from public sources, and the gaps are real ones. If you own this lens, know a serial number I'm missing, or can see where I have it wrong, tell me — corrections, serials and sample photos are all worth having.