Contax 139 Quartz

Yashica owned the factory, Carl Zeiss drew the lenses, and Porsche styled the body. That collaboration started in 1975 with the big Contax RTS, and the 139 Quartz arrived in 1979 as the small, affordable way in. The idea was simple and a little cynical: put a real Contax/Yashica mount on a body a student could actually afford, and let the Zeiss Planars and Distagons do the selling. It worked. For a lot of people the 139 was the cheapest legitimate ticket to German glass.

Pick one up and the first thing you notice is how light it is. This is a small SLR, closer to an Olympus OM in the hand than to the RTS, and the controls are minimal on purpose. Aperture-priority is the whole point. You set the f-stop on the Zeiss lens, the body picks a shutter speed from 1 second up to about 1/1000, and a column of LEDs down the right side of the finder tells you what it chose. There is a manual mode too, but nobody buys a 139 to shoot it manual. The "Quartz" in the name is literal: a quartz-timed shutter, which in 1979 was the marketing hook and in practice means the auto speeds stay accurate even as the battery voltage sags, as long as the electronics are healthy.

The viewfinder is bright and uncluttered, showing about 95 percent of the frame at 0.86x, with a split-image rangefinder ringed by a microprism collar, and it snaps into focus the way a good ground glass should. The shutter is a vertical metal blind, electronically governed and quiet, a soft electronic clack rather than the mechanical thwack of an all-metal body. Flash sync sits at 1/100. Film loading is ordinary back-door stuff, nothing clever, which is fine. The meter is a center-weighted silicon cell, good for its day, but center-weighting still gets fooled by strong backlight, and it will underexpose a face standing in front of a bright window.

That meter is the honest weakness, and it is the one practical place the app earns its keep. For a backlit portrait or a high-contrast street scene, take a spot reading with Zone Light Meter, decide which zone you want the shadows to land on, and dial the aperture to put them there instead of letting the body weight the center and call it done. The 139 will obey the aperture you give it; you just have to outthink its meter on the hard frames.

The other weakness is the one that haunts every electronic Contax: the body is only as alive as its capacitors and seals. A dead 139 is usually dead electronics, not a worn mechanism, and that is harder to fix than a stuck mechanical shutter. Light seals crumble with age, and a flaky shutter or a finder that has gone dark is common on untouched examples. Buy a clean, working one.

Today the 139 trades cheap, often cheaper than the lens you want to mount on it, and that is exactly its appeal. People cross-shop it against the Olympus OM-2 and the Nikon FE, and the 139 wins on one thing alone: it is the budget doorway to Zeiss. Buy the body to get the glass, and treat a working one as the bargain it is.