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| Vario-Tessar® – A new compact zoom lens by Carl Zeiss |
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Vario-Tessar® is a new zoom lens concept by Carl Zeiss which enables quite small lenses as required for current compact, lens-shutter ("point & shoot") camera designs. Market pressures require these cameras to be rather flat regardless of the image receiver used, be it 35 mm film, APS film, or a digital imager. The new Yashica T zoom, introduced at Photokina 2002 in Cologne, is the first camera to be equipped with a Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar® lens, in the 100th anniversary year of the original Zeiss Tessar® patent from 1902.
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| Yashica T Zoom with Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar lens |
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The design criteria given to Carl Zeiss were the following: moderate speed (f/4.5 to f/8), a moderate zoom factor (2.5x) and moderate image angles (77 to 35 degrees diagonally). The result is the Vario-Tessar® T* 4,5–8/28–70 autofocus lens in the Yashica T zoom camera, with close focusing to 0.5 m. While offering the useful wideangle of a 28 mm lens, Carl Zeiss kept the lens compact and highly affordable. The resulting design of the first Vario-Tessar® lens incorporates 7 lens elements, 2 of them aspheric. All elements are made from high quality optical glass. All glass types used are modern "ECO"-versions which are free of lead and arsenic. The Vario-Tessar® T* 4,5–8/28–70 lens in the Yashica T zoom camera offers autofocus and close range focusing up to 0.5 m.
The new Yashica camera with the first Vario-Tessar® T* lens has met the expectations of the market extremely well. The photo trade ordered this camera at Kyocera's Photokina booth in outstandingly high quantities for the Christmas season. Kyocera has decided to double the production capacity to keep up with the demand from the market. | |
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