Recently I was buying some cameras from a man who I understood to be a Dominican friar, of Iraqi descent and attired in an impeccable suit, just a shade off International Klein Blue. It occurred to me later that the natty suit meant he was not a friar, but rather part of the constellation of laypeople who aid the Dominican mission without going all-in on the robes and everything. My initial confusion was probably down to neither of us speaking our first language, instead working semi-obliquely in French. He struck me as interesting and I should have paid him closer attention as it seems a situation unlikely to repeat itself, but I was distracted by the cameras on the table between us and so registered little more than the suit and the fact that he was a polite but reasonably effective negotiator.
The cameras were part of the earthly estate of another Dominican who had been promoted upstairs some years earlier. A recent decluttering of the cloister had led to the man in front of me being charged by the surviving brothers with disposing of the equipment in a manner profitable to the order. The deceased Dominican had excellent taste in cameras. Of greatest interest to me was a Zeiss-Ikon Contarex with its 50mm Planar and a few other lenses.
I knew a little about the Contarex but I’d never handled one, and the moment I touched the thing my fingers sang. I had not until that moment experienced a camera that was not a Leica but that felt, in its inert state, like a Leica. I had come to assume that such a thing could not exist, so to be suddenly confronted with its factuality was a minor shock. It had that special mix of materials, minute tolerances, and subliminally perfect finishing so familiar from that other fabled German marque.
And yet, knowing that the Contarex is a 35mm SLR, my mind also recoiled. The weight, the sheer size of it, were astounding. It is a titanic camera: in its size, its mechanical complexity, its engineering bravado, its possible-then-but-not-now-ness, its unapologetic technical luxury... and in its hubris, its doomed fate. Zeiss built the Contarex to be the uber-SLR, king of kings, and the camera helped sink the company as surely as it would drown a photographer who fell overboard with one around his neck.
Seeing the naked lens mount gives a sense of the mammoth size of the Contarex.
In a way, the Contarex is the final shot in the war between east and west over what cameras would be in the second half of the 20th century. Before World War II, Germany was the undisputed world leader in the production of excellent cameras (I suspect America was the world leader of junk-ass camera production, though I don’t have numbers to back that up). But Japan was already a player, initially through rampant copying of German designs, but very quickly with its own innovations.
Going into the war, the rangefinder reigned as the serious 35mm camera design, even though SLRs had been sold since the mid-30s. SLRs, Jim, but not as we know them. Manual mirror reset, manual aperture cocking, and tiny waist-level finders (good luck seeing them at waist level) were the norm. Crap SLRs, basically, but in that crap were the seeds of the future. And crap is fertilizer. Like bombs.
After the bombs stopped dropping, the pentaprism SLR sprouted from that crap. In either Germany or Italy, depending how you tally. What is it with fascists and cameras? Anyway, the pentaprism SLR, or as we know it today, “the SLR,” was the future. The crappy SLRs showed you a tiny view, migraine-inducingly reversed left-to-right. With a pentaprism SLR, you look into a magic hole and see the world through your lens as the gods intended, just with shallower depth of field.
Leica had made its name by essentially inventing the 35mm rangefinder in the 20s, and coming out of the war largely intact, doubled down on rangefinders and launched the M system, the most beautiful and perfect camera system that humanity has yet devised. But as history loves to demonstrate, the beautiful and the perfect do not necessarily win out. Zeiss-Ikon knew this. Though it had been fighting Leica’s rangefinders with its Contax line for years, it already had real SLRs percolating in the 1930s… but events aforementioned intervened.
A Leica M2. Beauty that cuts.
As you might know, after the war Zeiss-Ikon, like Berlin, was divided in twain: the Reds walked off with everything in the Dresden works that the Allies hadn’t already blasted to shrapnel or melted to slag and formed a communist doppelganger of the original Zeiss-Ikon, dubbed Zeiss-Ikon VEB (which went through a few other names later after losing trademark battles with the legally persnickety capitalists). Western Zeiss got to keep the Zeiss-Ikon name, and the good china, and the dog.
But back to SLRs. Zeiss-Ikon VEB managed to launch the Contax S pentaprism SLR in 1949, and called “First!” since they could yell louder than the Italians at Rectaflex. But it was East German, so, you know. The good Zeiss-Ikon, now based in Stuttgart, launched a consumer-focused pentaprism SLR in 1953, starting the Contaflex (not ContaREX) line. These were designed around a leaf shutter, and my sense is that they did well enough in their time, but today they are mostly unloved, maybe because the lenses are relatively slow.
Meanwhile, Leica was refining their M system of perfect rangefinders. If you were a professional photographer who needed to be nimble in those years, you probably had an M3 or an M2 (I imagine studio work was mostly done with larger formats). But Zeiss-Ikon could feel the wind shifting. The SLR, loath as I am to admit it (and Leica remained in denial into the 60s), has some benefits for working pros. Maybe for everyone. So Zeiss-Ikon prepared to seize the nascent market for a professional SLR. It would be of the highest quality, and expensive as all get-out, but people were sure to buy it because it would be the best. It would be the Contarex.
Zeiss-Ikon announced the Contarex in 1958, but thanks to the tortured development process involved in bringing a built-from-the-ground-up mechanical product of mind-bending complexity into being, didn’t start moving units until 1960. In the intervening year, of course, something happened that shifted the history of cameras. Nippon Kogaku launched the Nikon F in 1959, the camera the company would eventually name itself after.
Did everyone in the Zeiss-Ikon boardroom shit their pants? I wonder. I doubt it. So much that’s shriekingly obvious in retrospect looks like a blur of possibilities when you’re living history forward. But let me whisper back through the time tunnel to those proud Germans: the party is over, meine herren und damen und nonbinary persons.
You can’t overstate the influence of the F. Considering one today, it does not give the impression of being particularly antiquated, even though it arrived before color TVs were common in American living rooms. The basic look and layout were so widely imitated (and iterated on by Nikon itself) that you can draw a straight line back from a modern DSLR to the F of 1959.
The Nikon F echoes through camera designs today.
Now, consider the Contarex. It is very obviously of another era, maybe even another timeline, where things went decidedly steampunk. The internet is full of people marveling at how heavy and solid the Nikon F is because their fingers are used to plastic trash and everything made of metal is “built like a tank.” The Contarex isn’t built like a tank. It’s built like it was made by gods, or aliens in a post-scarcity society. Aliens with strong backs (or a low-g home world), and some fundamental misunderstandings about how an SLR might be used by primates, and economics, which we can forgive since they don’t use money and probably don’t even have fingers.
We’re only 1,300 words in here, so I hope it’s not too soon to start the review. I decided to write this in part because there aren’t many reviews of the Contarex on the internet, unusual for an interesting classic camera in 2020. I think I understand why. A Contarex body is way too expensive for most people to buy on a lark. Ditto the lenses, of famously excellent optical quality and now, tragically, adaptable for mirrorless digital use. And even people who do buy a Contarex don’t usually feel compelled to crow about how great they are to use. There are probably two reasons for this.
The first is that usable Contarexes are apparently a fairly small subset of existing Contarexes. In the relentless pursuit of excellence, it seems Zeiss-Ikon didn’t worry too much about little things like repairability, or, to some extent, reliability. A design/manufacturing flaw in the way the lens aperture stop-down system works means that if a Contarex lens didn’t leave the factory with exposure problems, it would likely find them on its own soon enough. And apart from that, there are roughly 1,100 other parts in the Contarex body, each capable of failing in interesting ways.
The cyclopean light meter of the Contarex: a simple selenium cell behind a complex mechanical iris that’s coupled with the lens. What could go wrong?
I’m getting this from the site of the inimitable Henry Scherer, and you owe it to yourself to peruse it in all its Web 1.0 glory and eau de grumpy old man. Scherer is probably the most respected repairer of the Contarex and Contax cameras generally, and his site is a bald but ultimately convincing effort to terrorize you into sending your precious camera to him and only him. A side effect of reading it is that you’ll also never want to hand a lens you like to anyone else for service, but I think that’s a price worth paying. But is it worth paying Scherer’s price to repair a Contarex? That’s a more open question, and that’s just me politely saying hells no, if only to convince myself, because a deeper part of me would like nothing more than to spend unreasonable money restoring this beautiful machine to mid-century perfection. Unreasonable money? A basic CLA starts at $1,250. That’s if nothing is actually broken, just to get the thing lubed and adjusted, just for the body. Some people call foul on Scherer, accuse him of price gouging. But Scherer says he spends ten days on each camera he services (ten whole days on one camera: serial, not parallel processing). Now, I can say that I floss every tooth in my head three times a day and that doesn’t guarantee my mouth isn’t a horror of yellow ivory, but I’m inclined to believe Scherer, if only because that’s the world I’d rather live in.
The other reason is that even when a Contarex is working, you might not want to work with it. I’ve mentioned the weight and size, but wait, there’s more. The Contarex may be a dream to touch, but to use it, to actually release the shutter and wind it on, not so dreamy. And before a Contarex lover starts a furious all-caps comment, let me acknowledge that my experience comes from one, unserviced-in-decades example. But let me also say this: it has been my privilege to handle hundreds of similarly vintage cameras. Nikon, Leica, Pentax, Rollei, all the usual suspects and then some. Old cameras don’t usually feel like this.
The great majority of them, for example, still basically work, as long as they don’t have “Foca” stamped on them anywhere. My Contarex seemed to work initially, when I dry-fired it in front of the Dominican, but when I loaded a roll of Fomapan… it promptly tore the film apart. I might not even mention this except that a review of the Contarex I found online (what, you think I’d venture an opinion without first checking the hive mind?) reports the exact same thing happening. The writer claims the advance puts an unusual amount of torque on the film – I’d be more inclined to think this is not how the cameras behaved when they were new, but I don’t really know. Maybe the camera picked up the stink of Communism on that Fomapan and destroyed it out of vengeance for Dresden. Anyway, I next loaded an expired roll of Ilford HP 125 while humming God Save the Queen, and was very gentle about winding on the camera, and experienced no more violence.
Here is a selection of the Nikon Fs I’ve known. All but one arrived in my hands, after decades of neglect, still essentially functional. (The first in the lineup here was the exception, but it looked like it had been bouncing around in the bed of a pickup truck on rough country roads for years.)
Winding on. The pleasure of winding on, or arming or what-have-you, is to me one of the great reasons for shooting film. My gold standard for wind-on feel is the Leica M3 or M2, which communicate to the thumb, the hand, the soul, the perfect balance of ease, resistance, precision, certainty, and reliability. Other cameras can feel nice too, and the great variety of feels is another, somewhat surprising pleasure to explore: you might think that they would all feel similar since you’re just turning gears and tensioning springs, but no.
My Contarex is not fun to wind on. Its principle fault is great variation in resistance between the start and end of the stroke – it gets quite hard for the last third or so, and then stops in a manner that always left me unsure of whether I’d completed the stroke properly or not. The other reviewer I mentioned also experienced this, though he related it with fewer flourishes of language.
Is this age or design? I contacted Mr. Scherer and asked, but he was coy, saying only that these cameras benefit from service. He would not confirm or deny how it would feel $1,250 down the line. If you know, please leave a comment.
So now we’ve got film loaded, shutter cocked. Let’s take a picture. Lay your finger on the nubble sticking up from the center of the frame counter, on the right. And push. A little harder. No, kind of lean into it. There! You’ve taken a photo. You know because the whole frame counter sinks into the camera like a trap floor in some 1980s dream of an Aztec temple swallowing looters. You also hear a ku-thunk, or sometimes, with my camera, a ku…thunk. Something has gotten a bit gummed up and there’s an intermittent delay between when the mirror flips up and the shutter fires. Not something I’ve seen on an F. Just sayin’.
The Contarex shutter release. Precision metal work, but be ready to press it like a reluctant witness.
Let’s take a look into the viewfinder, which is famously bright, or allegedly so. I believe it must have been a sight to behold in 1960 because it’s just as bright (though not nearly as big) as the view through my Pentax MX of 1976, a pinnacle of SLR viewfinder design. Zeiss broke ground here, but others built more there later.
Since we’re already in the viewfinder, let’s focus. Turn the focusing ring on that 50mm f/2 Planar. Smooth, smooth, smooth. And light, despite the ancient grease. From one end to the other and back, perfectly even, perfectly damped, after decades. Get that split-prism lined up. OK.
Now grab the shutter speed selector, there on the same column as the frame counter and the film-speed/exposure compensation selector. Turn it. Yes. That’s the feeling we want. It is luxurious, precise, weighty without feeling heavy. Mmmmm. Turn it. Again. From 1/1000th sec down to... what’s this? Stuck at 1/8th sec? Well, you must have the sensitivity set too high. Lift the collar, turn that, feels nice, right? But why? Why not allow slower shutter speeds with faster films? Ask not why. We are not meant to question the motives of our alien gods.
The Contarex shutter release/frame counter/shutter speed dial/film speed selector/exposure compensation dial/arming lever. Simplicity itself.
And yet I must, because now it’s time to set the aperture. The aperture, the hole through which light passes in the lens, created by the delicate interaction of thin metal blades – pretty much every other camera maker does this with a ring around the lens. But Zeiss had other ideas. There is a ridged wheel on the front of the camera, just down from the main control column we’ve been twiddling: that is the aperture control. You read the setting from a small display on top of the selenium meter sensor. Turning the wheel causes a 10-bladed mini iris in front of the selenium sensor to mirror the iris in the lens. And that’s how the meter works. Simple in theory, but presumably fantastically complex mechanically.
The Contarex aperture display, to the left of the ridged aperture selector. Innovative, original, a pain in the ass.
Apart from point-of-failure issues, there are two problems with this design. The first is purely aesthetic: it doesn’t feel good. The best aperture selector rings, found on Leitz or Pentax Super Takumar lenses, are a joy to turn, to click from one stop to the next. I’ll spare you another rhapsodic digression, just try one if you haven’t. The Contarex’s little wheel has, for one thing, no click stops. Also, it has some play when you change directions (though that might be my aged sample again). But I’m just whining here. The real problem is practical: when you grip the camera with your right hand, your fingers will tend to bump this wheel towards smaller apertures. You get set to shoot wide open, and then after a few minutes of handling the camera, you find yourself at f/5.6. Now, this might be something one can adapt to. Presumably people did. But why?
Anyway, I shot the roll of HP 125, in a bit of a joyless hurry if I’m honest. And then I stand developed it in Rodinal from a crusty old bottle I found behind my color chemistry, a deep rust red like sunken battleships, and got blank film base, with a slightly gray leader. You know how they say Rodinal lasts forever? Wait, what? I could have sworn they said that. Well, I don’t feel like shooting another roll, so the only illustrations you’ll get in this review are of the camera, not with the camera. I don’t think that’s really a problem, though: the world does not agree on much, especially these days, but the opinion that Zeiss lenses of this era were excellent in their time and remain impressive today seems as unanimous as anything. Go find someone shooting them on a Sony camera if you’re really curious.
So, my verdict. The Contarex is a fascinating camera that suggests a world that might have been, but wasn’t. I write that, unusually for me, without misty nostalgia or mourning. Too often, winners win for the wrong reasons: deeper pockets, looser morals, collective idiocies. Yet sometimes, winners win because they’re better. Like the Nikon F.
But If you want a Contarex as a collector’s piece, for fondling, go for it. As a totem of adoration, it has a lot to recommend it. For sheer over-engineering, it’s a hard camera to beat. And while modern homage is closing the circle on the vintage designs it pilfers from, the Contarex stands apart, a beauty without descendants. Rex nunquam moritur.