Meniscus lenses 

A meniscus lens is asymmetrical. It may be converging or diverging, depending on the relative curvature of the two surfaces. Spectacles are made with meniscus lenses and so are compound camera lenses with up to twenty components.

Very early telescope objectives, eyepieces, and camera lenses, were plano-convex because only one surface had to be ground (by hand).

The first reported meniscus camera lens was Wollaston's 'landscape lens'. The converging meniscus lens was mounted with the larger radius of curvature outermost in a camera obscura used for casting the image of a stately house on to a large ground glass plate, so that an artist could more easily copy it in paint. The landscape lens gave a wider field of undistorted view than a plano-convex or bi-convex lens.