Carl Zeiss Jena 29mm f/2.8

Retro fit

The retrofit series features lenses from before the digital camera era being used on modern cameras. This is the fourth post in the series.

You may remember the article on the Carl Zeiss Jena 50mm DDR lens. It was broken, but some of the images still worked out quite nicely. In June I was lucky enough to get to go to Frankfurt and Brussels with work, and having taken the Carl Zeiss 50mm to Berlin it felt apt to take the Carl Zeiss 29mm to Frankfurt.

Mount	M42
Weight	215g
Purchased	8 February 2024
From	Nichola Camera Company, Camden
Price	£79

So why 29mm? I don’t in honesty know; it seems this was in part a trick used by lens manufacturers when a specific lens design (optical construction + focal length) was patented, so moving to a slightly different focal length would be enough to work around this. Whether this was the case here I’ve been unable to find out. I’m not wild about ~30mm as a focal length, but it’s not bad and a decent walk around field of view.

Just like the 50mm, this is a nice lens to focus. There’s nothing loose about the focus ring, nor is it grainy or tough. 29mm is relatively forgiving at f/2.8 or tighter, but it’s still easy to focus on my Sony A7RIII.

Unfortunately, the images can be a bit of a mess. There are moments where I think they have a lot of character and are a bit lomography-esque, but there were also plenty of moments that I thought the lens is just not very good.

Firstly, there’s some quite strong double-imaging in out of focus areas. Look at the text “Brussel-Zuid” in the image below. The out-of-focus regions are noisy and a look quite a bit like motion blur (but this image was taken at 1/1000 of a second on a stabilised body)

It doesn’t get much better when the out-of-focus areas have less range – here is a shop taken at f/2.8:

The general distortion is fine (easily fixed in software, but left here for you to see more clearly), but the out of focus edges of the sign are quite something, and again give an impression of a cheap disposable camera with a heavily compromised lens, not a great piece of German optics. There are times, such as the two below, where I actually quite like the look (even if the name of the cafe on the left hand side in the first picture is fairly unpleasant to look at), and the colours are rich and quite yellow, so great on a warm day

Because the focus is easy to use and fairly forgiving I found it fine to take pictures of people, especially if those people were relatively still moving – it’s no coincidence that both the below are people sitting to drink. I think the messy nature of the out-of-focus areas is more forgivable in portraits as we tend to concentrate on the person in focus and there’s something a bit dreamlike about the background.

In a similar vein to the Carl Zeiss 50mm, this lens has “character”, by which I mean it has pretty much every lens aberration you can think of, from bloom to geometric distortion to the above-noted out-of-focus issues. Surprisingly the contrast isn’t too bad when shooting into the sun which surprised me as I expected terrible flare. The lens does have MC (multi coated) written on the front, but given its general performance I still think these are decent.

Although I had a great meeting, spoke with great people and was very generously looked after in Frankfurt, I didn’t find it an inherently beautiful city. In some senses this was a good lens for that – it adds a bit of warmth, and the softness contrasts nicely with a city that was notable for tall glass towers and not so much for organic space.

I did have high hopes for this lens. Partly because of how the 50mm performed, and partly because it’s a nice size and feels nice to use so it would have been great for it to be good. The weight is fairly decent, albeit made heavier by throwing in a mount adaptor: it gets about 50% longer on my Sony because of this adaptor. This is a small lens (made bigger of course by a mount adaptor). It’s not going to get damaged easily, feeling well built and nicely controlled. The aperture ring is pleasantly clicky, although it’s a bit too easy to move off of f/2.8 towards a smaller aperture. Focusing is lovely with a nice grip and the lip on the lens is big enough to mean you don’t touch the glass when placing or removing the lens cap.

I don’t think this will come out with me many times again; I may sell it if it’s worthwhile. I’d be more inclined to take out my 50mm Carl Zeiss that is locked at f/2.8 than this, and for a lens manufactured at around the same time this has little of the charm of the Canon 135mm.