Contax S2b

Wind the lever on an S2b and the shutter answers with a hard mechanical clack, no electronic hum behind it, because there is nothing electronic to hum. The shutter fires whether or not you have a battery in the camera. The battery runs the meter and absolutely nothing else. That is the whole point of this body, and it is why people who own one tend to keep it.

The S2b is the black-finish, center-weighted sibling of the silver S2, which carried a spot meter instead. Kyocera built both Contax bodies in the 1990s as deliberately stripped-down mechanical cameras for a market that had drifted entirely toward autofocus and motorized everything. The titanium top and bottom plates give it real heft for such a plain body, and the build is tight in the way Kyocera-era Contax gear usually is. The meter reads out as a column of red LEDs down one side of the finder, marked with shutter speeds. You turn the speed dial and the aperture ring until the metered LED and your selected speed line up, with over and under arrows above and below to tell you which way to move. That is the whole interface. No averaging logic, no exposure lock, no second guessing on the camera's part.

And the glass is the reason anyone tolerates the austerity. The S2b takes the Contax/Yashica mount, which means Zeiss Planars and Distagons, the 50mm f/1.4 and the 85mm f/1.4 that built the system's reputation for rendering. A near-meterless body wrapped around some of the sharpest, most characterful 35mm glass ever bolted to an SLR. The standard screen is a split-image with a microprism collar on a matte field, bright and easy to snap into focus. The finder stays clean: the split-image in the center, the LED scale along the edge, your subject, nothing else.

The shutter is a vertical-travel focal-plane unit running from a full second up to 1/4000, with flash sync at 1/250. That top speed earns its keep. It is fast enough to shoot a Planar wide open in midday sun without reaching for an ND filter, which is the whole reason you bought a fast Zeiss lens in the first place. Speed selection is all mechanical, all on one top dial, no menus, no sub-modes.

The honest weakness is that center-weighted meter. It does what center-weighted metering has always done, which is hand you the wrong answer the moment a scene has a bright sky behind a dark subject, or snow filling the frame, or a single lit performer on a black stage. There is no exposure memory to bail you out and no automation to second-guess your dials. When the range gets real, read the shadows directly. An incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app lets you place your darkest important tone on the zone you actually want, then set the dials by hand. The body just executes; it is up to you to feed it a number you trust.

Today the S2b is sought out by manual-Zeiss shooters who keep circling back to it when they want this glass on something purely mechanical, and black bodies turn up less often than the silver S2. People buy it for the simplicity and the mount, and they put up with the plain meter because the lenses make the trade worth it.