Contax RTS II

A studio in winter, a single softbox, and a photographer shooting a head-and-shoulders portrait on a Planar 85. The RTS II sits on the tripod and does almost nothing you can hear. You set aperture priority, watch the readout, and fire with a touch. The shutter trips on an electromagnet, so there is no mechanical pull to nudge the camera off the eye you just focused. On fast Zeiss glass at slow speeds, that light release is what keeps a long handheld frame from smearing.

This was Contax cleaning up the original RTS. The 1975 RTS was a dense brick with a beautiful grip and a circuit that died when the cells did. The II, arriving in 1982, kept the bet on electronics and the Carl Zeiss mount but trimmed the body and tightened the build, so it feels less like a slab of stereo gear and more like a tool you would carry all day. The headline change is under the lens mount: a metal-bladed focal-plane shutter, marking the dial down to four seconds. Flash sync sits at a modest 1/60. That sync speed is the date stamp on the design. Fine for bounced fill indoors, a real limit the moment you want to balance flash against bright sun.

The finder is the part that earns its keep. It is big and bright, the way a portrait body should be, with interchangeable screens so you can run a microprism collar, a horizontal split, or a plain matte depending on how you focus. The meter is TTL center-weighted off a silicon cell, quick to settle and steady in mixed light, with the chosen speed marked down the edge of the frame. Loading is ordinary 35mm. The optional databack and motor drive bolt on without drama. In the hand it is dense and cold and steadies a slow handheld exposure better than its trimmed size suggests.

The honest part is the same one that haunts every electronic Contax. Aperture priority is a gift until the scene fights the meter, and a center-weighted reading gets fooled by a bright window behind a face or a stage lit against black, pulling the important tones dark to protect a highlight you do not care about. When that happens, stop trusting the readout. Take a spot or incident reading off the tones that matter with the Zone Light Meter app, decide which zone you want the shadows to sit on, and set the exposure by hand. The automation is a helper on contrasty work, not the authority.

The deeper weakness is age catching the circuits. These boards are decades old now, dead or flaky copies are common, and the parts to fix them are mostly gone, so a failed body is a paperweight with a lovely grip. Light seals will be crumbling on any untouched example. Buy one tested, fire every speed, and watch the meter track as you sweep the camera across a room. People still chase the RTS II for the reason they chase all of these, which is the glass. Planars and Distagons that flatter skin and draw out-of-focus backgrounds the rivals never matched, on a body that costs a fraction of the lens in front of it. You buy the camera to mount the Zeiss.