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Tuesday, September 9, 2008

By Jupiter!

A big difference between German optics and Japanese optics: German lenses have a name: Elmar, Elmarit, Summicron... for Leica, Tessar, Sonnar, Planar... for Zeiss. Apart from a few generic names on some old series (Takumar, Zuiko, Rokkor...) Japanese lenses have no personality...
Funny: when a Japanese takes over an old German firm (Cosina-> Voigtlander), he starts to give names to his lenses! (Heliar, Skopar, Ultron, Nokton).

The Soviets followed the same line as the Germans, giving an identity to their optics (a "name" followed by a number and a letter or two distinguishing variants): Mir (mainly short focal length) Industar (many "standard" focals) Tair (rather long focal lenses) are the most common names for Soviet optical design; Helios and Jupiter designate lenses "borrowed" from Carl Zeiss, or using the same optical formula (the Jupiter are often Sonnar, the Helios are Biotar). Some other less common names: Aurora, Altair, Vega, Granit (zooms), Zodiak, Meteor, Mercury, Orion, Rubin (copy of a Voigtlander zoom) Russar (so named because the inventor of their optical formula was Mr Rusinov) Sputnik, Era, Rekord. Not to forget the MTO which M is the initial of Mr Maksutov, inventor of the Maksutov-Cassegrain telescopes formula, well known to astronomers.
A legend tells that the "Helios" lenses are so named by analogy with "Sonnar", the two terms relating to the sun. The trouble is that no Helios is a Sonnar, they are Biotar. On the other hand Zeiss and Zeus would enunciate the same way in Russian, and the same way the Romans stole to the Greeks their god Zeus and called him Jupiter, the Soviets stole the German lenses of the God of optics Carl Zeiss, and have called them "Jupiter"!
One regret: the "Japanisation" of the Soviet and Russian lenses, with for recent productions a generic brand "Zenitar" which only allows a few poor variants: Telezenitar, Apo-Telezenitar, Variozenitar... what a pity!