Reputation
Now over 150 years old, Zeiss continues to be associated with expensive and high-quality optical lenses. Zeiss lenses are generally thought to be elegant and well-constructed, yielding high-quality images. Even old lens designs such as the Tessar demonstrate engineering elegance and in the modern age of plastic parts, many Zeiss lenses are still made with predominantly metal components.
Zeiss licenses its technology to be manufactured by third-party companies and indeed, many have done so. Notable names include Hasselblad, a famous name in medium format professional cameras. Rollei, Yashica, Sony, Logitech and Alpa amongst others, have used or manufactured lenses under Zeiss license. The Contax line of 35 mm cameras, first produced by Yashica and subsequently Kyocera until 2005 are perhaps the most well known to fit Zeiss lenses. Notably absent from this list are Canon, Nikon, and Pentax, who by and large produce their own lenses.
On 27 April 2005 the company announced a collaboration with Nokia in the camera phone market. The first product to emerge out of this collaboration is the Nokia N90.
Outside the world of cameras and imaging, Zeiss also produces spectacle lenses, particularly lenses made from high refractive index glass, allowing people whose prescriptions require stronger spectacles to use thinner lenses. These are sold in many countries. As of 2010 Carl Zeiss eyeglass lenses are sold in the United States through Carl Zeiss Vision Inc.
The Carl Zeiss Industrial Metrology subsidiary is a respected source of coordinate measurement machines and mutidimensional metrology systems. Zeiss is a recognized partner to the automotive industry.
A unique triplet of ultra-fast 50 mm f/0.7 lenses originally created by Zeiss for NASA's lunar program had the distinction of being reused by Stanley Kubrick in the filming of his historical drama, "Barry Lyndon". The period atmosphere of the film demanded that several indoor scenes be filmed by candlelight. To facilitate this, Kubrick had, with great difficulty, the lenses modified to mount onto a cinema camera and two of them subsequently further modified in separate ways to give wider angles of view.
Zeiss is currently in the process of designing the optical components for the James Webb Space Telescope set to replace the Hubble Space Telescope sometime in 2018.
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Famous quotes containing the word reputation:
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—French Proverb. Quoted in Dictionary of Similes, ed. Frank J. Wilstach (1916)
“This one fact the world hates; that the soul becomes; for that forever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside.”
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“It will do you no good if I get over this. A doctor’s reputation is made by the number of eminent men who die under his care.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)