What’s in a Lens Name? The Famous Lens Names

I love lenses. I love the ray diagrams I can build with the specs, I love the history, and I love all the possibilities that lenses can do for the betterment of the world.

I also love the lens names themselves, because the names engraved on the front rings of the lenses we use every day have their own stories, their own logic, and in some cases their own poetry.

I tried to construct this piece in in chronological order, starting in Jena in 1890 and working forward to 1966. As is with a lot of my pieces, it is a very biased take, with more emphasis on historical lenses that shaped manufacturing and the development of lens forms. Let’s dive in.

1. Protar (1890): Zeiss

We start with the oldest name on this list, and with a story about a name that almost wasn’t a name at all.

Paul Rudolph designed the first anastigmat lens for Zeiss in 1890. This lens had four elements in two groups, correcting simultaneously for spherical aberration, coma, and astigmatism, using a new barium crown glass developed by Otto Schott. It was a genuine landmark. Rudolf Kingslake later traced the entire Tessar lineage directly back through this design. At launch, Zeiss called it simply the Anastigmat, a Greek compound (an-, without, plus stigma, point) describing a lens that no longer smeared a point of light into a disc.

Here’s the twist. Ernst Abbe, Zeiss’s guiding scientific mind, refused to let the company trademark the word “Anastigmat,” on the principle that science belongs to everyone. Other manufacturers immediately started using the generic term for their own lenses, and Zeiss lost the exclusivity that should have come with being first. So the company renamed its version Protar, from Greek protos, meaning first: a name they could actually register and protect. The irony is hard to miss. A lens that couldn’t be called “first” in the generic sense got a proprietary name that means exactly that.

2. Dagor (1892): Goerz

A near-simultaneous rival to the Protar, and one of the most successful lenses of its era.

Von Tamasflex – Eigenes Werk, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Emil von Höegh designed the lens for Goerz in 1892, launched the following year as the Doppel Anastigmat Series III. It sold roughly 30,000 units in its first four years, mostly to military buyers, on the strength of a symmetric, six-element design in just two groups. In 1904, the name was shortened to a proper trade name: Dagor, a contraction of Doppel Anastigmat GOeRz. Von Höegh and Paul Rudolph had, remarkably, been working on almost the same idea in parallel, arriving at similar solutions to the astigmatism problem from different directions.

The Dagor’s four air-glass interfaces (very few for the period, and welcome since optical coatings hadn’t been invented yet) meant excellent contrast even uncoated, which is why the design stayed in production for decades, and why collectors still hunt for clean prewar copies today.

3. Planar (1896): Zeiss

Paul Rudolph designed the Planar at Zeiss in 1896, six years after the Protar.

By Tamasflex – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

The name comes from planus, Latin for flat, similar to a plane. A Planar lens is corrected for field curvature, producing a flat image plane. The early Planars suffered badly from flare due to the many air-glass interfaces in the symmetrical six-element design, and were largely overshadowed by the Tessar (which, counterintuitively, was invented later than the Planar) until coating technology arrived in the 1950s. Once anti-reflective coatings could manage the flare, the Planar came into its own and became, as Zeiss now puts it without much false modesty, the most copied camera lens design of all time.

The name is one of the most honest in the whole list. It tells you exactly what the lens does. The engineering is the name.

4. Heliar (1900): Voigtländer

Hans Harting designed the Heliar for Voigtländer in 1900, a modification of the Cooke triplet with two additional elements in a symmetrical layout.

Von WissensDürster – Eigenes Werk, Gemeinfrei, Link

The name derives from Helios, the Greek god of the sun. It’s a direct parallel to the Sonnar three decades later, and it actually got there first: Zeiss’s “sun” lens wasn’t the only one, just the more famous one. The Heliar became especially prized for portraiture, valued for a sharpness that stayed soft and forgiving rather than clinical. Harting kept tinkering, producing an asymmetric revision in 1902 and a reversed variant called the Dynar in 1903 that was later folded back under the Heliar name for marketing reasons.

The name proved durable enough that Cosina revived it in 1999 for modern Voigtländer-branded lenses, more than a century after Harting’s original patent. Other notable lens names from Voigtländer include Skopar, Nokton, Ultron, and Apo-Lanthar, all fine names in their own right.

5. Tessar (1902): Zeiss

Tessar sounds like it’s derived from the Greek word tessares, meaning four, expressing that the lens comprises four elements (Tetris, anyone?). Paul Rudolph designed it in 1902 at Zeiss, building directly on the Protar and an intermediate design called the Unar: four elements in three groups, and one of the most successful lens designs in history. (I’d argue that optically, the Tessar is a variant of the Cooke triplet.) By 2002, Zeiss alone had produced over five million Tessars. The total number of Tessar-formula lenses across all manufacturers has been estimated at over 150 million. You almost certainly have one somewhere, possibly in your pocket right now. Some of my favourite compact cameras, the Olympus XA and the Fujifilm Klasse S, have Tessar variants, and are wonderful little jewels of lenses.

In Zeiss lore, between the Protar, the Planar, and the Tessar, Paul Rudolph alone is responsible for three of the four ancestor lens designs from which nearly every modern photographic lens descends. (The fourth is the Cooke triplet, which, frankly, is a wonderful exercise in lens design but a boring lens name.)

6. Xenar (1919): Schneider

Schneider Kreuznach’s answer to the Tessar, and the first entry in a family of names that would define the company’s naming logic for decades.

The Xenar arrived in 1919 as a Tessar-type design, licensed once the original Tessar patent lapsed. The “Xen-” is subject to a lot of debate, so I don’t want to say anything definitive. It could come from the Greek xenos, meaning stranger or foreign, but it could also come from the element xenon. Schneider never fully clarified which reading was intended, so it’s entirely possible the choice was simply a good sound, easy to say, easy to spell, in the same spirit that would later give us brand names like Kodak. Whatever the reasoning, “Xen-” became Schneider’s signature prefix, later extended into Xenon and Xenotar.

7. Symmar (1920): Schneider

One of Schneider’s oldest large-format names, and one still in production over a century later.

The Symmar is a symmetric Gauss-type design, six elements in four groups, giving roughly 70 degrees of coverage. The name is a straightforward contraction of “symmetric,” describing the lens’s construction rather than any optical property in the way Planar or Tessar do. Certain Symmar variants were convertible: removing one lens cell converts the assembly into a longer, slower lens with different coverage, a clever bit of large-format engineering packed into a plain descriptive name.

8. Ernostar (1923): Ernemann/Bertele

A young Ludwig Bertele designed the Ernostar at the Ernemann company in Dresden, beginning the work in 1919 and patenting the f/2 version in 1923.

The name is a straightforward compound: Erno- from Ernemann, the company, plus -ar, a common addition to German lens naming. It was a modified Cooke triplet derivative aimed at dramatically increasing maximum aperture while keeping aberrations under control, and the Ermanox camera fitted with the Ernostar became the first camera fast enough to photograph in natural light without staging the scene. Photojournalism, in a real sense, was born from this lens.

Ernemann and three other companies merged into Zeiss Ikon in 1926, and Bertele carried his triplet-derived thinking forward into his next and more famous design.

9. Xenon (1925): Schneider

Albrecht Wilhelm Tronnier at Schneider was given an unenviable brief: build a fast lens to compete with the Ernostar. He based his design on the Opic lens, an asymmetric double-Gauss design developed in 1920 by Horace Lee at Taylor-Hobson, and took three years to complete a working f/2 six-element version, patented in 1925.

The name extends the “Xen-” root established with the Xenar four years earlier. The asymmetric design element became the direct ancestor of both the Zeiss Biotar (1927) and, decades later, the Contax/Yashica Planar 50mm f/1.4, after Zeiss acquired Tronnier’s patents through its purchase of Voigtländer in 1956 (Voigtländer was later sold to another company in the 1970s). A lens named for an uncertain reason ended up shaping some of the finest optics of the following half century.

10. Elmar (1925/1930): Leica

Before Berek’s lens carried the Elmar name, it went through an earlier one worth knowing.

Max Berek designed the first lens for Oskar Barnack’s prototype camera: a 50mm f/3.5 initially called the Elmax, an acronym of Ernst Leitz and Max Berek. When the design was improved and a copyright issue arose with the old name, it was shortened to Elmar around 1930. Clean, Germanic, and carrying just enough of its predecessor that you could see the lineage.

Elmar became the name for Leica’s slower, more compact lenses (originally f/3.5 and f/4) and it’s still in use today. Every subsequent Leica lens name is, in some way, a variation on or departure from the Elmar.

11. Hexanon (1925): Konica

Konica’s lens name comes straight from the company’s own history, and dates to the same year the Elmax was becoming the Elmar.

The Hexa- prefix derives from roku (六), the Japanese word for six, the same roku that appears in Konishiroku (小西六), the company’s old name. Konica’s first military lens in 1925 was called the Hexar f/4.5, named because rokumeans six and hexa is the Greek equivalent. The -non suffix, I can only assume, follows the German optical naming convention. Hexanon is essentially: six (the family number) plus the standard lens name ending. Unlike Protar, Tessar, and Sonnar, among others, Hexanon doesn’t depict a specific lens form; it’s the name of the entire line of lenses.

It’s one of the most insider names on the list, a quiet reference to a family lineage that’s rich in history while providing an elegant name.

12. Sonnar (1929): Zeiss/Bertele

Bertele designed the Sonnar in 1929, naming it after the German word Sonne, sun. The name was originally a tradename owned by Nettel Camerawerke in Sontheim am Neckar for an f/4.5 Tessar-like lens. Bertele and Zeiss adopted and transformed it. The implication was brightness: a lens fast enough to shoot in sunlight, or to bring sunlight-level exposure to situations where it wasn’t available.

The f/2 Sonnar of 1929 was followed by an f/1.5 version, extraordinary for its era. We covered the Sonnar in depth in the Double Gauss vs. Sonnar comparison post, so I won’t repeat that here. But the name is worth noting again: fast lenses named after the thing that made them feel less necessary. There’s an elegant irony in that, and it’s the second “sun” name on this list, thirty years after the Heliar.

13. Angulon (1930): Schneider

A plain, functional name, and none the worse for it.

Schneider introduced the Angulon in 1930 as their original wide-angle lens line, a symmetric anastigmat design related to the earlier Dagor. The name derives simply from angulus, Latin for angle. Not clever, not metaphorical. This is a wide-angle lens.

The Angulon covered roughly 80 to 90 degrees depending on the aperture. Schneider kept it in production for over three decades, right through the 1960s, before later Super-Angulons (built on Bertele’s Biogon principle) pushed coverage well past 100 degrees.

14. Nikkor (1932): Nikon

The lens name most likely to have crossed your path this week, and one that deserves proper treatment rather than a footnote.

Nikkor design, Wakiyama US4448497 (1981)

The Nikkor brand was introduced in 1932, a Westernised rendering of Nikkō (日光), an abbreviation of the company’s original full name, Nippon Kōgaku. Nikkō happens to be a real word too, meaning “sunlight,” and also the name of a well-known Japanese temple town. The -kor suffix was added to give the word the feel of a photographic lens name, following the German convention of endings like -ar, -or, and -on that already signified optical quality by the 1930s. Take this as merely my opinion, but Nikkor is, in a sense, Nikon trying to sound like Zeiss, which is a very understandable thing to want in 1932.

The first product to carry the name was the Aero-NIKKOR, an aerial mapping lens supplied to the Japanese military starting in 1933. It wasn’t until after the war that Nikkor became the name everyone knows today, attached to some of the finest 35mm optics ever produced. Like the Hexanon, Nikkor doesn’t depict a specific lens type, but (most of) a line of lenses. The early Nikkor lenses also carried a letter designation, such as C, H, or Q. If we mix Greek and Latin numbering conventions, the letters used, Tetra- (four), Penta- (five), Hexa- (six), Septem- (seven), Octa- (eight), Novem- (nine), represent the number of lens elements in that particular Nikkor lens. For example, the Micro Nikkor C 5cm F3.5 is a Sonnar-type lens with five elements (and a nice lens to boot).

There’s a layered meaning worth sitting with: like the Sonnar and the Heliar before it, Nikkor carries a solar association too, just one tied to a country rather than an aperture.

15. Biogon (1934): Zeiss/Bertele

Bertele again, his genius shining through with another lens that was so unorthodox in its creation: the Biogon.

The suffix -gon derives from the Greek word for angle and signifies a wide-angle lens. The bio- prefix is from Greek bios, meaning life: the idea of a lens that captures life as the eye sees it, with a wide, natural field of view. The Biogon was designed in 1934 as a symmetric wide-angle for the Contax rangefinder, and its basic design principle (a nearly symmetric arrangement with excellent distortion correction and flat field) is still one of the reference forms for compact wide-angle lenses today.

The -gon suffix caught on across the industry: Distagon, Hologon, Flektogon. Once Zeiss established that -gon meant wide-angle, everyone used it.

16. Zuiko (1936): Olympus

A name that requires a trip into Japanese classical literature.

Zuiko (瑞光) is a Japanese compound meaning auspicious light or glorious radiance. Zui (瑞) carries connotations of good fortune, and ko (光) means light. Although Olympus was called Takachiho Kogaku Seisakujo (Takachiho Optical Manufacturing Company) at its founding in 1919, the president at the time created an optical research institute called Mizuho Kogaku Kenkyujo (Mizuho Optical Laboratory, 瑞穂光学研究所) to put more emphasis on the camera business after starting out as a microscope company. Although Mizuho (瑞穂) and Zui (瑞) are phonetically different, they share the same kanji, and Mizuho Kogaku was abbreviated to Zuiko. It first appeared on Olympus lenses in 1936 and has been the Olympus lens name ever since, now appearing on Micro Four Thirds lenses as the M.Zuiko line.

I like to think it’s the most poetic name on the list, and the most Japanese in spirit. Not an aperture reference, not a classical language root, not a founder’s name. The founder’s vision was to capture auspicious light, and that capturing that light means something good is happening.

17. Rokkor (1940): Minolta

The name Rokkor is derived from Mount Rokkō (六甲山), a mountain visible from Chiyoda’s Mukogawa factory. I’d presume it was also inspired by the Nikkor name we just met, in use by Nippon Kōgaku since 1932.

So Rokkor is geography plus a little admiration. There’s something quietly Japanese about naming a lens after the mountain you can see from your factory window. Rokkor first appeared in 1940 on an aerial photography lens, and went on to adorn some of the most respected lenses of the postwar era. The 58mm f/1.2 Rokkor in particular has a devoted following that shows no signs of dimming, but I’m partial to the tiny G-ROKKOR 28mm F3.5 on the Minolta TC-1.

18. Takumar (1952): Asahi/Pentax

The only name on this list that honors a person rather than a physical property or a classical root.

Takumar is a reference to Takuma Kajiwara, a well-known Japanese-American photographer and painter, and the younger brother of Kumao Kajiwara, founder of Asahi Optical Corp. The analogy of using lenses to paint with light, as if they were brushes, plus the addition of the letter R at the end, gave the name a nice poetic ring.

Lenses as brushes. Light as paint. It’s the most artistic name in the list, which fits a company whose founder was named after an artist. The Super-Takumar and SMC Takumar lenses of the 1960s and early 70s are still widely regarded as some of the finest optical work of their era, and among my favourites, sometimes even above the renowned Leica lenses.

19. Xenotar (1952/53): Schneider

Schneider’s answer to the Zeiss Planar, and the last of the “Xen-” family.

Introduced in the early 1950s as a five-element, four-group design similar in structure to the Planar and Biotar, the Xenotar became the premium option on Rolleiflex TLR cameras, competing directly against the Zeiss Planar for that spot. Where “Xenon” simply extended the family prefix, “Xenotar” borrows the -tar ending already established by the Tessar, tying the newer, faster design back to Schneider’s oldest lens family. Rollei enthusiasts have argued the Planar/Xenotar question for seventy years without much resolution, which is probably the best evidence that both companies got it right.

20. Distagon (1953): Zeiss

The story of the Distagon starts with a design problem, solved independently by two labs on opposite sides of a newly divided Germany.

Single-lens reflex cameras created a specific geometric headache: a wide-angle lens’s rear element normally sits close to the film plane, but on an SLR that space is occupied by the mirror. Pierre Angénieux in Paris and Harry Zöllner at Carl Zeiss Jena (East Germany) both solved this in 1950 with an inverted telephoto arrangement, a large negative element up front pushing the effective rear focal point back. Angénieux called his solution “Retrofocus.” Zöllner’s team in Jena called theirs “Flektogon.”

When Carl Zeiss in Oberkochen (West Germany) developed their own version starting in 1953, they needed a name distinct from their East German counterpart, the same company split in two, competing under the same heritage. They landed on Distagon: a combination of “distance” and the Greek -gon already established with the Biogon. A wide-angle lens with a large distance to the image. It’s a rare case of two divided halves of one historic company solving an identical problem and giving it two entirely different names, for reasons that had nothing to do with optics and everything to do with the Cold War.

21. Summicron (1953): Leica

Back to Leica, and the name that might be the most beloved in this entire list.

The term Summicron is widely believed to combine “summit” (the highest point of achievement) with a contraction of “chroma” (Greek for colour). Other sources suggest that “cron” was actually a reference to the English company “Crown,” which supplied the glass for the earliest models. Another theory I’ve come across is that it’s named after Micron. To me, it doesn’t much matter what the true origin is; Summicron is a great lens name regardless.

Summit of achievement, plus crown glass, plus colour correction. However you read it, the Summicron is Leica’s f/2 standard, and has been since 1953. The 50mm Summicron-M is probably the most discussed lens in the history of photography. The predecessor f/2 lens was the 1939 Summitar. Walter Mandler designed the 1974 version still considered a benchmark. Peter Karbe’s APO-Summicron pushed the name into new territory.

22. Summilux (1959): Leica

If Summicron is the summit, Summilux is the summit plus light.

“Lux” combines with a derivative of summus, meaning highest or utmost (the English word “summit” shares this root), just like the Summicron and its f/1.5 predecessor, the Summarit, in 1949. Lux is Latin for light, the same root as Noctilux, luxurious, and the SI unit of illuminance. Summilux is Leica’s f/1.4 line: maximum achievement, maximum light.

The naming logic is consistent throughout the whole system. Elmar (f/3.5) is the starting point; Elmarit (f/2.8) derives from the Elmar; Summicron (f/2) is the summit of colour correction; and Summilux (f/1.4) adds light to the Summicron. Add the modern Summarit (f/2.4 to f/2.5), introduced in the 2000s, and you can trace the whole history of the Leica lens lineup in the names alone.

23. Noctilux (1966): Leica

The Noctilux stands apart from everything else on this list.

The name combines “nocturnal” (nocturnus, Latin for “of the night”) with lux, light. Night light. A lens designed to see in the dark. The original 1966 Noctilux was f/1.2; later versions went to f/1.0; the current model is f/0.95. The original f/1.2 had the world’s first serially produced aspherical lens element, hand-ground by a single meister, Gerd Bergmann. It’s an almost unreasonable object, and its name captures exactly what it is: not fast, not bright, but nocturnal. A lens that does the work of the sun after the sun has gone down.

Several other aspiring fast lenses were produced around this time: the Teikoku Kogaku Zunow 50mm f/1.1 in 1953, the Nikkor-N 5cm f/1.1 in 1956, and the Canon 50mm f/0.95 in 1961. Noctilux certainly has grandeur to its name: distinctive, evocative, and it tells you exactly what the lens is for.

The Through-Line

Looking at this list as a whole, chronologically, a few patterns emerge.

The German names arrive first and dominate the early decades: Protar, Dagor, Planar, Tessar, Xenar, Symmar, Ernostar, Xenon, Sonnar, Angulon, Biogon, Xenotar, Distagon. That’s most of a century within this list. These are the names of engineers trying to describe what they built, in the most precise terms available. Even the poetic ones (Sonnar, Heliar, Biogon) describe optical properties rather than aspirations. Even the Protar’s near-miss is a story about precision: Ernst Abbe cared more about the integrity of a scientific term than the commercial advantage of owning it.

The Japanese names arrive next, from the 1920s through the 1950s, and are about everything else. Mountains, people, family histories, auspicious light, national identity. Nikkor carries sunlight and a temple town. Hexanon carries a family lineage. Zuiko carries a wish. Rokkor carries a mountain visible from the factory window. Takumar carries an artist’s name.

Leica, starting in the 1920s and running the longest of all, built an entire taxonomy linking aperture to achievement, light to luxury, and night to possibility. It’s understandably the most systematic of the three traditions, and the most literary, since it’s one company’s naming logic carried out consistently across decades.

All of these names are reaching for the same thing: a piece of glass worthy of what it does. Within those naming schemes, we see glimpses of physics, shades of geography and of nature, and the occasional tribute to the people who came before.

The best part is we get to talk about which name holds a close place to us. For me, it’s the Takumar, with the Summicron as a close second. Feel free to leave a comment and let me know your favourite lens name. It doesn’t have to be one on my list.