Zeiss

A maker of optical and photographic equipment.

The company has its origins in Jena, an industrial city in Germany, in 1846. There, Carl Zeiss, a faculty member in Jena University, started up his company producing optical equipment.

They were a dominant force in photography and microscopy for much of the 20th century, and responsible for many advances in both fields. The history of Carl Zeiss is a long and tangled one, involving many take-overs and mergers (like many other companies), as well as restructuring due to World Wars (spinning off Pentacon in East Germany). Read about it at: http://www.contaxcameras.com/home/history.html

Today, they still make fine research microscopes and photographic lenses under the Zeiss name, and cameras under the Contax name.

Zeiss is a large German optics company. They make almost everything involving glass and light including microscopes, telescopes, glasses, camera lenses and even the great big doohickies that sit in the middle of planetariums.

They are one of the oldest optics companies in the world, founded in 1846 and they are responsible for some of the most important advances in optics, including:

• Anastigmatic, distortion free lenses
• Prism binoculars
• UV microscopy
• The first planetarium
• Coated lenses to reduce reflections
• The phase contrast microscope
• The first pocket binoculars
• Colour corrected lenses