The famous symmetric lens design invented by Dr. Paul Rudolph at Carl Zeiss in 1896. The Planar® lens is the most successful camera lens design – and, by the way, the most plagiarized – ever created. It provides the lens designer with numerous means to correct aberrations extraordinarily well. And its performance is very constant over a wide range of imaging ratios, enabling such a versatile lens variety as the Makro-Planar lens.
Typical Planar lenses:
Makro-Planar T* 2.8/60 lens for Contax/Yashica
SLR Cameras. | 
Makro-Planar T* 4/120 CFE lens for Hasselblad Medium Format Cameras. |
The ideal basis for high-performance lenses with great color correction, high speed, flat image plane (this is where the name comes from) and low distortion. The Planar design is the basis for nearly all professional "workhorse" lenses on earth and in space today, and for the fastest lenses ever created. The fastest lens in the Hasselblad range is of course a Planar lens: the Planar T* 2/110 FE lens. |  back |