Contax 137 MD Quartz

A motordrive whirring through a roll of Tri-X at a street festival, frame after frame at a thumb's pace, and the photographer is not winding between shots. That is the 137 MD Quartz doing the one thing its older brother the 139 would not: advancing its own film with a built-in motor while you keep your eye to the glass. Single shots or about 2 fps in continuous, with rewind still done by hand on the crank. Contax bundled the drive into the body in 1980, which for a 35mm SLR of that era was a real convenience and not a gimmick.

What you get is an aperture-priority automatic. You set the f-stop on the lens, the camera reads center-weighted through the lens with an SPD cell and picks a stepless shutter speed, anywhere from a long 11 seconds down to about 1/1000. The Quartz in the name earns its place. It points to a quartz-timed shutter, which holds those long exposures honestly instead of drifting the way a cheaper RC-timing circuit would. Flash sync sits at 1/100, ordinary for a focal-plane shutter, and you live within that for fill.

The reason anyone reaches for this body is the front of it. This is a Contax/Yashica mount, which means Carl Zeiss T* glass: the Planar 50mm f/1.4, the Distagon 28mm, lenses with a long-standing reputation among photographers who care about optical quality. The 137 was the affordable door into that system. Students and enthusiasts who could not stretch to an RTS bought this and put the savings into a Zeiss prime. The viewfinder is bright, the meter readout is a simple set of LEDs down the side, and the controls are quiet and uncluttered.

The honest weakness is the obvious one for any all-electronic body of this vintage. Without battery power, the 137 is a paperweight. There is no mechanical backup speed, no emergency 1/100, nothing. Four AA cells in the base and you are alive; a dead set and you are carrying a brick with beautiful glass bolted to the front. The other watch-out is age in the electronics themselves, the motor and the auto-exposure circuit, neither of which a normal repair shop will touch in 2026. Buy from someone who has run film through it recently.

On price it sits well below the RTS and the later 167MT, which makes it one of the cheapest tickets into Zeiss 35mm shooting you can find. People cross-shop it against the Yashica FX-3 (same mount, fully mechanical, no motor) and against an Olympus OM body for the lens lineup. The case for the 137 is the integrated drive and that quartz-steady auto exposure at long shutter speeds.

The catch with center-weighted metering is a bright sky or a backlit subject, where the cell averages in all that light and quietly underexposes the part you cared about. For a high-contrast scene, take a spot or incident reading off the Zone Light Meter app, decide which zone your shadows belong on, then set the aperture and let the body's stepless shutter handle the rest. The automation stays useful; you just stop handing it the decisions it gets wrong.