Contax Aria

You are standing in a doorway, light pouring in behind your subject, and you have about four seconds before the moment is gone. This is where the Aria earns its keep. It is the smallest, lightest body Contax ever hung the Zeiss Contax/Yashica lenses on, and it has a spot meter built in, so you can drop the reading onto the face instead of the blown window behind it and shoot. The bigger RTS bodies do the same job and weigh twice as much. The Aria does it in a jacket pocket.

Contax brought it out in 1998, near the end of the line, as the carry-everywhere alternative to the RTS III. The body is mostly polycarbonate over a metal chassis, and people who only know the brass-and-titanium Contax bodies sometimes sneer at that. They are wrong to. The plastic is what makes it light enough to actually bring, and the build is tight, with a real in-finder data LCD and a thumbwheel that falls right under your hand. The viewfinder is bright and shows about 95 percent, with an aperture-priority readout down the side. Aperture priority is the heart of how this thing works. You set the f-stop on the lens, the camera picks the shutter speed, and the focal-plane shutter runs from a long 16 seconds up to roughly 1/4000, with flash sync at 1/120.

The metering is the reason to choose this over a plain RX or 167MT. You get center-weighted, multi-segment evaluative, and a true spot, switchable on the fly, which on a small body in 1998 was not common. The spot is genuinely useful for the high-contrast work the Aria is good at. That said, trust it and only it on a backlit scene and you will fool yourself, because spot-metering a bright cheek still places that cheek on middle gray and the shadows fall where they fall. This is the one spot to slow down. Pull an incident or shadow reading off the Zone Light Meter app, decide which zone you want the dark side of the face to land on, and set the lens from that instead of letting the body average the doorway light. The camera does the rest.

The honest weakness is the one every late-period electronic Contax shares: it is dead without batteries, and there is no mechanical backup speed at all. A pair of CR2 lithium cells runs everything, and when the electronics fail there is no shop with a parts bin to fix them. Light seals also go gummy with age, so a clean copy is worth paying for. None of that stops it being the one people grab when they want Zeiss rendering and do not want to carry an RTS.

Today it is cult kit among travelers and street shooters who already own the 50mm f/1.4 or the 35mm Distagon and want the lightest way to feed them film. It cross-shops against the Nikon FM3a and the Olympus OM-4Ti, and it tends to win on glass. Where it loses is the morning the battery dies: the OM-4Ti is just as electronic and goes dark with it, but at least the FM3a, with its full mechanical shutter, will still fire at every speed. If you can live with that bargain, nothing this small puts better optics in front of a frame of 35mm.