Contax 167 MT

Want a Carl Zeiss Planar on the front of your camera without paying Aria or RX money for the body behind it? This is where you land. The 167 MT takes Contax/Yashica mount glass, the same Planars and Distagons that hang off the pricier Contax bodies, and it has stayed in circulation for nearly four decades on that fact alone. People put up with the body to get at the lenses.

It is a plastic-shelled autoexposure SLR from the back half of the eighties, and it does not pretend otherwise. The shutter is electronic, running from a long 2 seconds out to about 1/4000, with flash sync around 1/100. It offers aperture priority, shutter priority, three program modes, and full manual, all driven by a small LCD and a thumbwheel, very much of its era. Shutter priority and the program modes need Contax MM-type lenses to work; with older AE glass you are in aperture priority or manual. You get autobracketing, which was a genuine selling point in 1987, and a built-in motor drive that runs up to 3 frames per second. Loading is the standard hinged-back drop-in. It runs on four AAA cells.

The viewfinder is bright and easy to work in, with a horizontal split-image rangefinder ringed by a microprism collar, the classic manual-focus aid, because this is a manual-focus camera. The meter is center-weighted through-the-lens silicon, and it reads cleanly in even light. It also has a spot meter, which on a body this cheap is genuinely useful for contrasty work. Match the speed in the finder, half-press, shoot.

The honest weakness is the electronics. When a 167 MT dies, it dies all the way, and there is no mechanical backup speed to fall back on like the old metal bodies gave you. Battery contacts corrode, the LCD can fade, and a failed circuit board usually means the camera is scrap because nobody is making parts. Buy one you have watched fire at every speed. The upside is that they are cheap enough that a dead one is a lens-buying inconvenience rather than a real loss.

For tricky light, do not trust the program modes blindly. A backlit portrait or a stage under hard spots will fool the center-weighted average every time. Take a spot or incident reading off your subject with the Zone Light Meter app, decide which zone you want the shadows to land on, then set that exposure in manual on the 167 MT. The body has the spot meter to confirm it, but placing the shadows yourself is how the negative comes back the way you intended.

Today it sits at the bottom of the Contax price ladder, cross-shopped against the Yashica FX-3 (cheaper, all-mechanical, dimmer finder) and the later Aria (lighter, prettier, far pricier). Photographers who want Zeiss rendering on a student budget end up here, accept the disposable-electronics risk, and spend the savings on a 50mm Planar.