Via its official blog, Carl Zeiss has announced that it "will... label its lenses differently: Carl Zeiss will become ZEISS." Throughout its long history, Carl Zeiss has used various labels on its lenses. From the 1920s, the moniker "Carl Zeiss Jena" would appear on a variety of its products. After WW2, some of the company's employees established a new factory in Oberkochen, West Germany, and adopted a new label with the inscription "Carl Zeiss," while the East German factory located in Jena continued to brand its products "Carl Zeiss Jena." After several, often long-winded international lawsuits, the West German factory dropped the founder's first name, Carl, from its logo; while in the US - where the Oberkochen-based company was granted exclusive use of the name "Carl Zeiss" - the East German factory's produts were relabelled "aus Jena." The reunification of Germany brought about a merger of the two Zeiss firms, and a new company logo was created - but the branding of the photographic lenses continued to differ from that of the firm's other products (such as eyeglasses and microscopes). Now the company decided that it will use only the ZEISS logo on the front ring of its lenses. "The changeover for the lenses will take place at the family level: existing lens families will not be changed after-the-fact, but future families will be labelled with ZEISS," the company said in a statement. "The first family to introduce this change is the ZEISS Touit lenses."

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