Contax 159 MM

Put a Nikon FE2 and a Contax 159 MM on the same table and the resemblance is obvious. Both are early-eighties aperture-priority electronic SLRs with a vertical-travel shutter that tops out near 1/4000 and syncs flash at 1/250, both built for people who wanted automation without giving up a real metering brain. They are an even match on the spec sheet. The Nikon has the deeper used-lens ocean behind it, and a motor drive that runs faster than the Contax accessory winder. The Contax has Carl Zeiss glass screwed onto the front, and once you have looked through a Planar 50mm f/1.4 wide open, the spec sheet stops being the point.

That is the whole pitch for the 159 MM. The body is a means to an end, and the end is the Contax/Yashica mount and the Zeiss lenses that live on it. The "MM" marks the multi-mode Zeiss lens coupling introduced alongside this body in 1984: MM lenses carry an extra pin that lets the camera control the aperture itself, which is what enables program mode on top of aperture priority and manual. The shutter runs from 16 full seconds down to about 1/4000, fast for 1984 and still useful for daylight fill today.

In the hand it is plasticky compared to the brass-and-magnesium feel people romanticize, but it is light and it gets out of the way. The finder is bright, with a split-image center and a microprism collar, and the meter readout sits down the side as a column of LEDs rather than a swinging needle. Center-weighted TTL, accurate, nothing fancy. Loading is ordinary 35mm with a manual wind lever. It runs on small batteries and it runs on them completely. No power means no shutter, no meter, no camera. That is the price of the electronics.

So that is the honest weakness, and it is a real one. These are 40-year-old electronic bodies, and when the circuitry or the shutter magnets give up, there is no mechanical fallback and rarely an economical repair. A dead 159 MM is usually a parts donor. Buy one that has been tested across all speeds, listen for the self-timer and the long exposures actually timing out, and accept that a CLA on this generation is not always worth what it costs.

For a tricky scene the center-weighted pattern will average a bright sky into mud, so for backlit portraits or high-contrast street light, take a spot or incident reading off the Zone Light Meter app and place your shadows on the zone you actually want, then set the aperture and let the auto mode follow. That keeps the highlights off the shoulder where the body's averaging meter would dump them. Today the 159 MM is the value entry into the Contax world. People cross-shop it against the Aria and the heavier RTS bodies, and they land here when they want Zeiss rendering on a student budget. The smart move is to spend your money on the glass and think of the body as the consumable part of the kit.