Contax RTS III

At the moment the shutter fires, a ceramic vacuum plate in the back sucks the film dead flat against a reference plane. That is the RTS III in one sentence. When you are shooting transparencies wide open on a fast Zeiss lens, that flatness is the difference between a sharp frame and a soft one in the corners. Nobody else in 35mm did this in a production body. It is the kind of engineering that only makes sense if you are chasing edge-to-edge resolution and you do not care what the camera weighs.

And it is heavy. This is a brick, the heaviest serious 35mm SLR Kyocera ever shipped under the Contax name, with the Porsche Design housing wrapped around a motor drive that hits five frames a second. You feel every gram on a strap by the end of a long day. The trade is a body that feels machined out of one block, with damping on the mirror and shutter that turns the whole action into a muffled, expensive thunk rather than a snap. The focal-plane shutter runs from long half-minute exposures up near 1/8000, with flash sync at 1/250, so you can drag a slow speed in a dim room or kill bright sun on an f/1.4 lens without a filter.

The meter is the other reason people kept this body. You get center-weighted readings and a true 3mm TTL spot at the center of the viewfinder, which on a transparency-era camera is not a luxury, it is the job. A top-deck LCD spells out your settings at a glance. The finder is bright, big, and shows shutter and aperture data along the edge, and focusing runs on a clean horizontal split with a microprism collar. Aperture-priority auto handles most of the day, and you flip to manual when the scene fights you. For a backlit portrait or a stage lit from one side, even this good a meter wants to average everything toward gray, so take a spot reading off the face with Zone Light Meter, place those shadows on the zone you actually want, and set the body in manual.

The honest weakness is the electronics. Everything depends on the battery and the boards, and the vacuum mechanism is one more thing that can fail thirty years on. A dead RTS III is a paperweight, and a working CLA for one is not cheap because few techs still touch the vacuum system. Light seals go like they do on any body of this age. Buy from someone who has run a roll through it.

Today it sits in the odd position of being a flagship that costs less than you would guess, because the autofocus G2 stole the spotlight and the Aria is lighter for travelers. People cross-shop it against a Nikon F4 or a late Canon EOS-1, and the RTS III answers with that vacuum back and the Zeiss glass in front of it. It is a studio and landscape tool, not a street camera, and the photographers who keep one are usually shooting slides and chasing every last line pair the lens can give them.