I'm not too sure that this is exactly "all you need to know", but it is a good primer. Thanks for pointing it out, Steve. I especially appreciate the authors attitude about triplets - rather than holding them in distain he has elevated them to be the important lens design that they were.
It is quite likely that your OM lenses are of the same lens "type" as a number of their competitors. The differences between lenses of the same "type" arise from issues like construction materials and methods, sample variance tolerance, glass quality and type, coating quality and type and flare prevention.
Generally those issues, along with issues like marketing and manufacturing economies of scale, are the issues that determine selling prices for new lenses.
Yeah, that's a bit confusing. I think it stems from the fact that the Tessar is sort of a hybrid of the two designs---it's a triplet with the rear element replaced with a cemented group, and then on the other hand it's a RR with both elements replaced by groups (one cemented, the other not)---and the Sonnar certainly has some noticeable Tessar DNA. The same thing happens with the Elmar---it's listed in Part 1 as a Tessar derivative under the RR section, then in Part 2 as a triplet derivative.
The article acknowledges the ambiguity of the Tessar in Part 1, but kind of fudges around it in Part II. Maybe the attempt to keep the article simple went a little too far and obscured the fact that many lenses have more than one "ancestor".
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