Carl Zeiss Sonnar T* 1,5/50 Limited Edition

In September 2007, Carl Zeiss opened order books for a brand-new lens in the Nikon S mount — a mount Nikon itself had only just resurrected with the S3-2000 and SP reissue bodies. The Sonnar T* 1,5/50 Limited Edition was a Japan-only, build-to-order affair: orders taken through authorized Zeiss agents from 20 September to 31 December 2007 at ¥105,000 list, with the lenses — built by Cosina, like the rest of the modern Zeiss rangefinder line — shipping in 2008. The gesture carried a pointed symmetry. Nippon Kogaku’s first fast fifties, the 5cm f/1.5 and f/1.4 of 1949–50, were Sonnar types derived from the prewar Zeiss original; six decades on, Zeiss returned the compliment and delivered a genuine Sonnar in Nikon’s own bayonet.

Despite the vintage name, the optics are not the classic seven-element Sonnar. This is the modern C-Sonnar recipe of six elements in four groups (1-1-1-3) — the same formula Cosina had put into series production for the M-mount C Sonnar T* 1.5/50 ZM in 2006 — wearing Zeiss’s T* multi-coating. The execution, though, deliberately reaches back to the 1930s: an internal-mount lens with no focusing helicoid of its own, driven by the body’s helicoid exactly as the inner-bayonet Contax Sonnars and their Nikkor descendants were. Omitting the helicoid lets the barrel shrink to 48.8mm by 34.2mm and 190g, noticeably slimmer than its ZM sibling, and the diaphragm gains a blade over the ZM’s ten — eleven near-circular blades running from f/1.5 to f/16 — with a 43mm filter thread, 0.9m minimum focus, and a dedicated bayonet shade in the box. One caution Map Camera spells out for buyers: despite the visually similar inner mounts, the Nikon S and Contax standards differ, and the lens does not interchange with Contax RF bodies.

How many exist is the lens’s standing mystery. Zeiss never announced a figure and declined to give one even when asked directly; a “fewer than 200” figure still circulates in dealer copy, but it cannot be right — owners’ reported serials run past 300. Every known production example sits in a single 15715xxx block, observed from 15715012 to 15715305, and on the assumption of sequential numbering the best estimate is roughly 300 lenses — with a stray prototype, serial 00000012, surviving in private hands. Even the “Japan-only” program proved slightly porous: at least one example was retailed new by Robert White in the UK around 2008.

The rendering is exactly what the recipe promises. Reviewers describe coma well corrected while spherical aberration and astigmatism keep the image soft and dreamy at f/1.5, axial color tinting the out-of-focus highlights, with sharpness building quickly as it stops down — soft, but never unusably so. And owners rarely leave it on reissue bodies alone: the long-running forum thread that doubles as the lens’s serial registry is equally a chronicle of Amedeo-adapted use on Leica M cameras, where the S-mount Sonnar paradoxically delivers the ZM experience with a proper focusing wheel. The market has rendered its own verdict — a ¥105,000 lens now changes hands around ¥198,000 in Japan, when it surfaces at all.