CK's Lens Post: Carl Zeiss Jena Spiegelobjektiv (Mirror Lens) 1000mm f/5.6

I moved this old post from preview.com to here. This is my first post.

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That is right. This is one of the only two beasts: Carl Zeiss Jena Spiegelobjektiv 1000mm f/5.6 (East Germany in the 1960's) and Carl Zeiss Mirotar 1000mm f/5.6 (West Germany in the 1970's). The former AKA CZJ 1000/5.6 has two colors, the light green for military uses (perhaps surveillance) and the black one for photography. This one is about 30.6 lb (or 13.9 kg) and is really big. But, the Mirotar is even larger and heavier.

It is very interesting to note that both 1000mm f/5.6 lenses used the Bouwer design rather than the Maksutov design. Both designs appeared approximately at the same time with Maksutov published his work in a journal, while Bouwer did not.

This lens has a very large base for mounting on tripod, in fact, much larger than the plate on any tripod heads I have, Gimbals included. Furthermore, to ensure focus is correct to some degree, I used a 5" battery powered LCD monitor connected to my Sony A7II. Then, how do I mount it on a tripod? No way, I would not try it. So, I used a Platypad max and a Marsace ball head.

This is the final setup:

Now look at the Marsace ball head, it does not support the heavy lens very well and, as a result, lens vibration may be visible.

I have to find some way to stablize the heavy beast. So, I switched to a Gimbal, actually a Gitzo Gimbal head as shown below. Because the lens tripod mount base is so wide, actually wider than the space the Gitzo can support. One way to resolve this issue is raising the Gimbal mounting plate to its nearly top most position. However, this is still not high enough to clear the Gimbal arm. As a result, I added a thick tripod plate and bingo this is the following. The camera is a Sony A7II and the lens on it is a Russian 300mm f/5.6 mirror lens.

The following is a close up of this combo:

pages.mtu.edu/~shene/CZJ-1000-5.6/LENS-05.jpg

The following from the rear. It really looks a little odd. Isn't it?

pages.mtu.edu/~shene/CZJ-1000-5.6/LENS-06.jpg

If you play with heavy lenses often, you may suspect that raising a lens this high stability is still a problem. Yes, you are perfectly right. However, the situation is much better using a ball head.

* ADDED LATER *

Later I found a fork-mount made by the Move company. In fact, I have a very sturdy mount from my old Celestron C8; but that mount is way to heavy to be moved around. Instead I am in favor of a lighter mount that can by put on my Gitzo tripod. The following images show a rather good result:

CK

The old C8 mount is pretty heavy duty!

I simply do not like the design here. The editor is not friendly and after some time of inaction I was logged out. As a result, my unfinished post was automatically posted. I don't know whether there is a way to upload my image here because it seems to me I can only provide the link of each image. I do hope that after consolidated a number of post @ Preview.com and repost the new article I would have a better and more complete article on the CZJ Spiegelobjektive 1000mm 1:5.6 here. For now, I am rather disappointed. I wrote article on lens, cameras, accessories, drones, computers, etc. in Chinese and post them on my blog. If you are interested in these topics, please take a look at My Blog in Chinese on Old Cameras, Lens, etc.. You can always use translate.google.com to translate these articles to English or whatever available languages. Some shorter versions of my articles appeared on Preview.com first and a complete articles in Chinese appeared on my blog.

I hope to use this opportunity to repost my Preview.com article in a new form here. Hope I will be able to master the editor and image upload here fast. I am crossing my fingers.

* ADDED LATER *

Later I found a fork-mount made by the Movo company. In fact, I have a very sturdy mount from my old Celestron C8; but that mount is way to heavy to be moved around. Instead I am in favor of a lighter mount that can by put on my Gitzo tripod. The following images show a rather good result:

* END OF THE ADDED INFORMATION *

The images below were shot with the first lens setup. Please note that all images were intentionally under-exposed to gain higher shutter speed to reduce camera shaking. The top part in each image has a black band because I used EEFC. Later I switched to full mechanic shutter and the black band disappeared. Additionally, dark corners are obvious and it is the problem of a badly chosen adapter, a M42 to Sony E adapter with helicoid. Later I changed to M42 to Pentax K and Pentax K to Sony E or Nikon Z and dark corners disappeared. These test images are distance based because most if not all lenses may perform differently. However, due to its size, tests below distance 300m were not done.

When you look at these images, please keep in mind the very shallow Depth-Of-Field (DOF) of a 1000mm 1:5.6 lens. For example, in the 300m test image, around the top corner, the house roof could have been outside of the DoF.

CK

I thought my MTO-11CA was heavy, it's also a 1000mm mirror lens but only f10, so not even close to these beasts!

I had a chance to use the CZ Mirotar 1000mm f/5.6 decades ago (for several days) shooting films on a Contax RTS III. That beast is even heavier than this East German version. The reason is perhaps because the CZJ version used thinner front glasses.

CK