Contax RTS

In 1975 the serious photographer's choice was a Nikon F2 or a Canon F-1, both of them mechanical, both built to outlive their owners with no batteries at all. Contax answered with the opposite philosophy. The RTS runs on electronics from the shutter button down, and if the cells die the camera dies with them. That was the bet. Hand the timing to a circuit, marry it to Carl Zeiss glass, and let the Germans and the Japanese fight over who actually made the thing. It was developed jointly with Carl Zeiss, Yashica built it, and the Porsche Design studio styled the body. It does not look like a Nikon. It looks like a piece of stereo equipment from the same decade, all matte black planes and a grip that falls into your right hand like it was molded there.

The shutter release is the whole point of the name, Real Time System. There is no mechanical linkage. You press a touch-sensitive button and an electromagnet trips the shutter, so the lag is short and the action is feather light, almost too light if you are used to the long deliberate pull of an F2. The cloth focal-plane shutter runs from a long four seconds up to around 1/2000, with flash sync at 1/60. The meter is TTL center-weighted off a silicon photo diode, and it is genuinely good, quick to respond and steady in mixed light. You shoot it in aperture priority most of the time. Pick your f-stop, watch the readout, let the camera find the speed.

The finder is bright and big, the way a portrait body should be, with a clean ground glass and a microprism collar at the center that pops into focus fast on a fast lens. The screen comes out from the top, so if the microprism does not suit your eye you can swap in a split-image or a plain matte instead. Loading is ordinary 35mm, nothing clever. The body has real heft, dense and cold, the kind of weight that steadies a slow exposure handheld.

Here is the honest part. Aperture priority is convenient until the scene fights the meter, and a center-weighted average gets fooled by a bright window behind a face or a stage lit against black. When that happens, stop trusting the readout. Take a spot or incident reading off the important tones with the Zone Light Meter app, decide which zone you want your shadows to sit on, and dial the exposure in manually. The body's automation is a helper, not an authority, and on contrasty work you want to be the one placing the shadows.

The deeper weakness is age catching up with the circuits. These are fifty-year-old electronics, and dead or flaky boards are common, often unrepairable because the parts are long gone. A working RTS is a wonderful camera; a dead one is a paperweight with a beautiful grip. Buy one tested, fire every speed, and watch the meter track as you sweep across a room. People still seek them out for one reason, which is the Zeiss lenses, those Planars and Distagons with a drawing style that flatters skin and renders out-of-focus backgrounds in a way the rival systems never quite matched. The camera is the price of admission to that glass.