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The Petzval lens is a lens design developed by Joseph Max Petzval, professor of higher mathematics, in 1840. Petzval succeeded in creating a lens free of spherical aberration, coma, astigmatism and longitudinal chromatic aberration, and its distortion and lateral chromatic aberration were insignificant. At the same time, the lens had a record speed for its time. This type of lens was proposed by Josef Petzval as a portrait lens and revolutionized the daguerreotype, which had been invented a year earlier: the Petzval lens was 16 times faster than the best lenses of the time, allowing shutter speeds to be reduced and portrait photography to be transformed from a chore into a relatively easy task.

Optically the lens consists of two achromatic doublets with an aperture stop in between; the front component is cemented, the rear one is air-spaced. The field curvature of the Petzval lens cannot be corrected, resulting in excellent sharpness only for the central part of the image and quickly decreasing towards the edges.