Carl Zeiss BIOTAR 1.5 / 75mm does anybody have this lens?

I love the Carl Zeiss BIOTAR 75mm f/1.5 lens. I am thinking about buying one of them but I can see that there is a huge range in price for this lens. They seem the same to me. I am just wondering whether anybody can tell me which series of these lens I should buy to get the best image quality and what makes the price to range so wide...

Well, the Exakta mount version is more ubiquitous and harder to adapt so they *tend* to be slightly cheaper. M42 versions more expensive.

The conventional thought is that the "Pre-War" version gives nicer images; they are narrower/straighter than the post-war fatties:

http://www.mflenses.com/gallery/manual-focus/Biotar

Owning both a post-war Biotar 75/1.5, and its soviet/russian copy, the Helios 40-2 85/1.5, I prefer the latter, which you can now get a new production one for $500 on Ebay.

Thanks so much! The Helios is not that expensive, actually, The pre-war biotar is super expensive...

I had a late-model T-coated fat biotar in M42 mount for a while. It was a nice lens, a bit of glow wide open but very sharp stopped down. Nice swirl in the bokeh. I paid $450 for it a few years ago, later sold it as I wasn't using it much. They seem to have gone up a fair bit in price since then.
-Ed

Yes the prices have become quite insane recently. I wanted this lens so bad when I was a teenager but was not able to afford. And it was only 1/3 then of what is paid now!