Contax RTS II Quartz

Trip the shutter and what you are really firing is a circuit. The RTS II runs a quartz-timed electronic focal-plane shutter, and the quartz part is not about feel or sound, it is about accuracy: the speeds are held to a crystal reference instead of springs and an escapement, so the timing holds steady across the range and across temperature. There is a real wind lever on top, but everything that matters happens electronically, and the body needs its battery to do anything at all. No cell, no exposure.

That timing is where the Quartz name comes from, and in 1982 it was the pitch. Contax had moved past the original RTS and built a body whose shutter, 16 seconds at the long end out to about 1/2000 at the top, was governed by that crystal clock. Aperture priority is the mode most people live in. You set the f-stop on the Carl Zeiss lens, the body reads the scene and picks the time, and an LED scale down the right side of the finder shows you what it chose. It also does full manual when you want to override it, which the studio crowd leaned on for slide film. The viewfinder is bright and big, and the standard screen is a microprism type, though the screens are interchangeable so yours may differ. The meter is center-weighted and genuinely good.

The whole reason this body exists is the glass. Contax/Yashica mount, which means Zeiss Planars, Distagons, and the Sonnar 85mm f/1.4 that portrait shooters still hunt down. The Yashica side of the mount let students in on cheaper bodies, but nobody bought an RTS II for a Yashica lens. They bought it to put a German optic in front of film and let the quartz shutter nail the time. Flash sync sits at 1/60, conventional for a focal-plane body of the era, so daylight fill takes some thought rather than syncing at any speed the way a leaf shutter would.

In practice it is a studio and serious-amateur camera that is discreet enough for the street. The build is dense, the controls are spare, and the ergonomics still hold up four decades on. The weakness is the electronics. When an RTS II quits, it tends to quit completely, and the pool of techs who can revive the quartz timing board shrinks every year. Light seals turn gummy, the LED readout can fade, and a proper CLA costs real money. This is not a fifty-dollar body you abuse and toss.

Today people cross-shop it against the Nikon FE2 and the Olympus OM-4. The pull is the same as it was in 1982: it is the cheapest way into Zeiss glass on 35mm, with bodies still reasonable and the lenses anything but. The center-weighted meter is fine in even light and gets fooled by backlight, like every averaging system. When the scene fights you, take a spot reading off the shadow with the Zone Light Meter app, place it where you want it on the zone scale, then set that aperture and let the quartz shutter hold the time.