Makro-Planar T* 4/120 CFE

The specialist for close-ups

• Superior image quality in the near range, even at full aperture
• Optimum performance at reduction ratios of approx. 1: 20 to 1 : 2, i.e. object sizes of approx. 1 x 1 m to 10 cm x 10 cm, adjustable down to 0.6 m to the front edge of the lens
• Ideal for product and advertising photography, analog and digital, flora and fauna, industry and documentation.

This is the must-have lens for every photographer doing serious close-up work. We believe that no studio photographer specialised in advertising, product, food, technical or industrial photography can really do without it. Combined with a motorized Hasselblad SLR or the Hasselblad FlexBody for creative selective tilting of the sharpness zone, the Makro-Planar® T* 4/120 CFE lens is the compact workhorse lens for day-to-day studio work – be it analog or digital.
Optically well-designed makro-lenses like the Makro-Planar T* 4/120 CFE lens differ from other lenses in two ways.

First: Their performance is optimized for subjects like the one you're just looking at: A flat page slightly larger than a human head with intricate detail plus color. Which means that the image quality and light distribution is extremely good, even in the corners and even at full aperture. This is exactly what is needed for serious professional copy work of subjects that are smaller than the ones ideally photographed with the Carl Zeiss Planar T* 3,5/100 CFi lens, e. g. delicate drawings (so the two lenses complement each other very well in the hands of a demanding photographer).

Second: A basic type of lens design is chosen that maintains its performance characteristics very constantly on a high level over a wide range of reduction ratios or distances.
Like from half life-size (1:2) to infinity, in the case of the Makro-Planar T* 4/120 CFE lens.
It is based on the Carl Zeiss Planar lens design type, which offers very good close-up potential and is therefore also chosen as the basis for the ultra high resolution Carl Zeiss S-Planar lenses for the micro-lithography, which are – in their new version – called Starlith, the most sophisticated lenses of our day.

Although the Makro-Planar T* 4/120 CFE lens can and should be used for subjects as small as postcards, the built in focussing helicoil allowes only to focus down to a single page. This has been done for safety reasons: Since most of the Hasselblad SLR cameras in use with professional photographers today do not incorporate TTL exposure metering, we believe that the lens should not easily focus down to such reduction ratios without warning, where exposure compensation is absolutely unavoidable for professional results. Adding an extension ring for closer focussing should remind the photographer to apply the necessary compensation.

The CFE version of the Makro-Planar T* 4/120 lens allows for fully automatic compensation of exposure in extreme close-up photography provided a Hasselblad camera with built-in TTL exposure meter is used.