Contax G2

Kyocera built the G2 in 1996 to fix the camera it had shipped two years earlier. The G1 was the gamble: a titanium-bodied autofocus rangefinder that mounted real Carl Zeiss glass, an attempt to give the Zeiss name a modern 35mm home after the manual-focus Contax/Yashica SLR line had run its course. The G1 worked, but it focused slowly and its top speed was modest. The G2 answered both complaints. Faster autofocus, a shutter that climbs to roughly 1/6000, a built-in motor that rips through a roll at about four frames a second, and a body that still feels like it was milled from a single block of metal.

What you get is a rangefinder with no rangefinder patch. The G-mount lenses focus by wire, the camera reading distance and driving the lens, so the bright finder shows you parallax-corrected frame lines that shift as the optics move, not a split image to align by hand. Purists hated this on principle and then shot the thing anyway, because the Zeiss lenses are the whole argument. The 45mm Planar is one of the sharpest normal lenses ever sold to the public. The 90mm Sonnar and 28mm Biogon are nearly as good. Glass this clean on a body this small is the reason people still pay for the system.

In the hand it is dense and cold, all titanium skin and precise dials. Aperture sits on a ring, shutter speed and exposure compensation on top plates, and the metering is center-weighted TTL that you can run in aperture priority or full manual. The meter is honest in even light. Film loads on a motorized take-up; drop the leader, close the back, and it threads itself. It runs on two CR2 cells and it is genuinely dead without them, so this is not a camera you take somewhere batteries are hard to find.

The honest weakness is the autofocus, even improved. It pairs passive phase-detection focusing with an active infrared rangefinder, 1990s tech, and in low light or on a low-contrast subject it will hunt, then confidently lock on the wrong plane. The 90mm is the worst offender because its depth of field is thin and a small focus miss shows. People who shoot the G2 fast learn to half-press, confirm the distance readout, and recompose, which is most of the speed advantage gone. For a backlit street scene or a high-contrast frame where the center-weighted meter wants to average everything gray, take an incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app and place the shadows where you want them, then dial that into manual.

Today the G2 is the camera people buy when they want Leica-grade Zeiss output without Leica money, and it usually costs a fraction of an M6 with comparable glass. The trade is honest: you give up the manual rangefinder and the all-mechanical independence, and you get autofocus, a faster shutter, and lenses that go toe to toe with Leica's best from the same years. Cross-shopped against an M, it loses on romance and wins on results. The one real long-term worry is electronics, since nobody is making new parts, but clean bodies keep selling because nothing else puts this glass in a coat pocket.