Company Profile: Rodenstock

Pekka Buttler, 01/2025

Quick summary

Rodenstock is a German optics company with a very long tradition. The company started in 1887 with the manufacture of eyeglass lenses, later diversifying into camera lenses, cameras, and various other lenses. Today Rodenstock is again a pure eyeglass (and eyeglass lens) manufacturer.

Rodenstock is interesting to the photographer wanting to combine legacy lenses with modern cameras especially due to the interchangeable lenses that Rodenstock manufactured throughout the middle of the century.

History of Rodenstock

Rodenstock GmbH was founded in 1877 by Josef Rodenstock in Würzburg, Germany. Like many companies in its era it began as a general manufacturers of precision instruments (including barometers and various other measuring instruments) before increasingly focusing on optics. By 1883, the company had relocated to Munich. Under Josef’s leadership, Rodenstock developed and patented innovative products and gained a name as a premier manufacturer of eyeglasses and seeing-aids. In the early 20th century Rodenstock started combining its capabilities in optics with its precision manufacturing background and started manufacturing cameras and selling lenses for other camera makers.

In the 1920s, Rodenstock shifted focus to mass-producing camera lenses for major manufacturers, ceasing its own camera production to meet the high demand. During World War II, the company manufactured binoculars and optical prisms for tanks, while continuing the production of eyeglasses, deemed essential for military purposes. Post-war, Rodenstock returned to its core competencies in photographic and ophthalmic lenses and frames.

The 1950s marked a period of significant growth under the leadership of Rolf Rodenstock, Josef’s grandson. The company increased its investment in public advertising, restarted its camera lens manufacture and expanded its product range to include projection lenses for slide projectors. While Rodenstock optics (whether for prosumer cameras or large format cameras) had a fearsome reputation, this alone could not compensate for the increasingly unfavourable competitive position of the german optics industry. By the end of the 1970s, Rodenstock was fast withdrawing from the manufacture of small and medium format lens manufacture.

In 1996, Rodenstock spun off its precision optics division, including the production of lenses for analog view cameras and digital view cameras with high-resolution digital backs, into a new company, Rodenstock Photo Optics. This division was acquired by Göttingen-based Linos Photonics AG in 2000, marking Rodenstock’s exit from the photographic lens manufacturing business.

Today, Rodenstock GmbH focuses on the development, production, and distribution of ophthalmic lenses and frames, as well as sunglasses, sports eyewear, and specialised products like reading and computer glasses.

Rodenstock lens names:

Alike most German companies, Rodenstock had the habit of giving its lenses names that echoed the lens’ design or use-case. Some of the typical Rodenstock lens names are:.
• Eurygon (wide-angle lenses for 35 mm format, 2nd generation retrofocus)
• Grandagon (symmetric wide-angle lenses for large format)

• Ysarex (Tessar-type lenses, 35 mm format to large format)
• Heligon (fast, standard lenses, double-Gauss design, 35 mm format)
• Sironar-N (symmetric, standard lens for large format)

• Rotelar (short and medium tele lenses, 35 mm format)
• Yronar (medium tele lenses, 35 mm format)
• Apo-Ronar (narrow-angle lens for large format, specialised for repro and product photography)

• Imagon (specialist portrait lens)¹

• Rodagon (enlarger lenses)

Rodenstock serial numbers

Rodenstock is one of those companies that throughout its life used a running serial numbering scheme, hence facilitating easy dating of lenses. The data summarised here is based on an online document published in 2009 by Linos. The document has since been taken down².

Production Year	Serial # up to	Rough annual production3	Production Year	Serial # up to	Rough annual production	Production Year	Serial # up to	Rough annual production
1910	50 000	N/A	1969	6 500 000	200 000	1994	11 231 713	56 000
1920	200 000	15 000	1971	7 000 000	200 000	1995	11 294 073	57 000
1930	400 000	20 000	1972	7 500 000	250 000	1996	11 358 165	72 000
1935	700 000	60 000	1973	8 000 000	375 000	1997	11 407 513	64 000
1938	900 000	62 000	1974	9 000 000	500 000	1998	11 468 541	64 000
1940	950 000	50 000	1976	9 300 000	460 000	1999	11 521 123	58 000
1945	2 000 000	210 000	1977	9 500 000	400 000	2000	11 588 264	59 000
1952	2 500 000	71 000	1979	10 000 000	200 000	2001	11 649 679	58 000
1954	3 000 000	111 000	1981	10 300 000	200 000	2002	11 678 274	54 000
1957	4 000 000	300 000	1984	10 500 000	100 000	2003	11 724 136	51 000
1960	4 500 000	250 000	1986	10 750 000	90 000	2004	11 767 376	49 000
1961	5 000 000	286 000	1989	10 950 000	90 000	2005	11 805 455	43 000
1963	5 300 000	217 000	1991	11 000 000	50 000	2006	11 860 241	42 000
1966	6 000 000	200 000	1993	11 150 000	50 000	2007	11 926 199	50 000
						2008	11 944 338	44 000

Footnotes

1. The Imagon is specialist lens designed specifically for portraiture. The lens lacks many of the elements one would consider essential to a interchangeable lens: It does not have a focusing mechanism (use a helicoid or a view camera), and it does not have an adjustable aperture (instead it uses interchangeable diffusion disks). The lens is one of the classic professional soft-focus “portrait lenses”. ↩︎
2. But can still be found on the Wayback machine here. While the document explicitly says that the serial numbers were used only on “Rodenstock lenses” the jump in production figures during WW2 would indicate that any multi-element system (whether photographic lens or binocular) was given a serial number from the same series. ↩︎
3. Calculated from data in the table using a running average of a minimum of 5 years. Rounded to the nearest thousand ↩︎