Contax RX

Look at the bottom of the RX finder and you get a row of segments that fill toward center as you bring the plane into focus. Contax called it the Digital Focus Indicator, an electronic focus-confirmation readout grafted onto a manual-focus SLR. You can lean on it or ignore it and focus on the matte screen by eye. The point is what it says about the camera's moment in the mid-nineties: Contax was bolting electronics onto a manual body for shooters who wanted Zeiss glass and would not trade it for autofocus.

The glass is why you put up with the rest. The RX runs the Contax/Yashica mount, so the Planars, the Sonnars, the Distagons, the whole lineup that built the Contax name. The body is a mid-size 35mm SLR with the dense, metal-where-it-counts heft of the era. It runs on batteries and makes no apology for it; there is no mechanical fallback, so a dead cell means a dead camera. The shutter is a vertical focal-plane unit that climbs to about 1/4000 at the top and syncs flash near 1/125, quick enough to balance a strobe against a bright afternoon.

The meter is center-weighted, aperture-priority by default with manual on tap, and it reads honestly in even light. Aim it at a window and it does what averaging meters do, which is hand you a dark subject against a blown background. That is where you stop trusting the body. A spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app lets you place a backlit cheek on zone IV instead of letting the cell split the difference. You pick the aperture, the camera picks the speed, and the exposure lands where you decided it should.

Portrait and wedding shooters carried these, people who wanted Zeiss rendering with a meter and a film door that loaded fast between rolls. A few street photographers tried them, though the RX is heavier and louder than the Contax rangefinders, so most of those went elsewhere. The finder is bright and the standard matte screen renders cleanly, which matters in daily shooting alongside the segmented focus bar.

Then there is the weakness every electronic Contax shares. When the board dies, the camera is done. No mechanical speed to fall back on, parts are scarce, and the techs who can actually fix one are thinning out. A flaky RX tends to be a paperweight rather than a project. Light seals go gummy with age like everything from those years, but those you can swap at the kitchen table.

Today the RX sits in a strange spot. It costs less than the Contax Aria people cross-shop it against, far less than the rangefinders, yet it opens the same Zeiss lens family. Buy it for the glass and the handling. Know the electronics are a gamble, and spend a little more for a copy that has been tested rather than the cheapest one in the case.