Contax 139 Quartz

Drop into a dim church for a christening, set the dial to Auto, and the 139 holds the aperture you picked and stretches the shutter out to whatever the scene needs, all the way down to eleven full seconds, without you touching anything. In low light it just sits there and counts, quietly, while you keep your eye on the focus. That long automatic reach is a real comfort when the room goes dark.

It came out in 1979 as the small, affordable way into the Contax/Yashica mount, the same bayonet that carried Carl Zeiss T-star lenses like the 50mm f/1.7 Planar and the 85mm f/1.4. The body itself is a modestly priced electronic shell. The glass in front of it is the draw, Planar and Sonnar designs that out-resolve almost anything you could bolt onto a budget SLR of the period. You buy the 139 on the cheap and spend the saving on the lens, which is exactly why it still gets handed to people who want Zeiss rendering without paying Contax RTS money for the privilege.

In the hand it is light and trim, smaller than the RTS that sat above it. The quartz-timed shutter is where the name comes from. The release is electromagnetic, a feathery touch with no mechanical detent, so you learn to roll your finger onto it rather than press. The finder is bright, a horizontal split-image patch ringed by a microprism collar, and down the right edge runs a column of red LEDs marking the speed the meter has chosen. The center-weighted SPD cell reads cleanly and rarely fights you in even light. You half-press, the diode lights against the scale, and you fire when the number looks right. Flash sync is a modest 1/100 and the top speed lands around 1/1000, so this is not a body for stopping motorsport, but for portraits and available-light work it has the range.

The honest weakness is total battery dependence. The 139 has no mechanical backup speed, so when the two SR44 silver-oxide cells die, the camera is a paperweight until you swap them. The other recurring gripe is age. The electromagnetic release and the meter circuit are forty-odd years old now, and a dead or erratic body usually means a cold solder joint or a tired capacitor rather than something a hobbyist can clean. Light seals will be crumbling on any untouched example, so budget for a cheap reseal.

The scene that fools its center-weighted meter is the classic one, a backlit subject against a bright window, where the center-weighted reading pulls everything dark to protect the highlight. For that shot, take a reading from the Zone Light Meter app, place the shadow side of the face on the zone you actually want, and dial that exposure in by hand rather than trusting the LEDs. Where it sits today, the 139 is the cheap door into Contax, cross-shopped against the Olympus OM-2 and the Nikon FE. It holds its own on the body alone, and the moment you remember what mounts on the front, the contest is not close.