Contax S2

Contax built the S2 in 1992 for its sixtieth anniversary, and it did the one thing the brand had spent the previous decade running away from. It went all mechanical. While the RTS line was piling on aperture priority, motor drives, and electronic everything, the S2 stripped the camera back to a fully mechanical, manually wound body with shutter speeds that fire whether the battery is alive or dead. The only thing the cell does is run the meter. For a system built on Zeiss glass and electronic ambition, that was a strange and pointed move, aimed squarely at people who wanted a Contax that handled like a Nikon F2.

The body is titanium, light in the hand for how solid it feels, and the shutter is a vertical focal-plane unit that runs from a full second up to about 1/4000, with flash sync at 1/250. The wind lever is short and crisp. There is no auto anything. You set the speed, you set the aperture on the lens, and you read the meter, which is the part that trips up first-time owners. The S2 uses a spot meter, not center-weighted, just a tight reading from the middle of the frame. The original silver S2 reads through a tight 5mm spot covering the microprism doughnut; the later black S2b switched to a center-weighted average for something more forgiving.

That metering pattern shapes how the whole camera shoots. Used well, the spot is exactly what you want for placing exposure by hand. You point the patch at a shadow, read it, and put it on the zone you want. Used carelessly, it will fool you in seconds, because a spot reading off a bright sky or a dark jacket throws your whole frame off. This is the scene where an incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app earns its keep, giving you a second opinion so you can place the shadows where you actually want them instead of trusting one tiny circle in the finder.

The viewfinder is bright and plain, a split-prism center with a microprism collar, easy to focus with the fast Zeiss primes the C/Y mount is known for. Put a Planar 50mm f/1.4 or a Distagon 28mm on the front and it makes a compact, capable kit. It shares the same Contax/Yashica mount as the RTS bodies, so any C/Y Zeiss lens drops right on, and that compatibility is a big part of why people buy into the system in the first place.

The honest weakness is that spot meter again, and the price it now commands. Beginners hate the metering pattern, and a lot of S2 bodies sold cheap to people who later flipped them in frustration. The black S2b with its averaging meter tends to be the calmer daily shooter. Today the S2 sits in the cult-classic tier, cross-shopped against the Nikon FM3a and the mechanical Pentax bodies, and the titanium build plus the Zeiss mount keeps the asking prices high. People buy it because it is the one fully mechanical Contax, and because it lets them run a hard manual workflow with that glass in front of it.