Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2006/03/30
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]At 05:45 PM 3/30/06 -0600, Jeffery Smith wrote: >Thanks for the clarification on the lens differentiation, Marc. The lack of >compatible bodies available is what has steered me away from the Contax line >of Zeiss RF lenses. True, Voigtlander does make a Contax-compatible body, >but the price is just too steep for me considering how few Zeiss lenses I >own (2...both 50's). Jeffrey The Voigtl?nder plant produced its last item in the 1970's. Cosina produces a camera under the Voigtl?nder brand in Contax RF BM, but it is not a Voigtl?nder product. A working Contax II costs around $175 or $200 or often less, and is a potent instrument -- Capa's shots on the D-Day beaches, for instance, were made with one of these. There weakness is that the shutter tapes wear out over time but these can readily be replaced from a number of sources, most notably Eddie Smoloff in Brooklyn, who buys his stock from the Arsenal works in the Ukraine. Other than this, the mechanism on these cameras is incredibly tough and will last a long time -- yes, there are many gears and many bells-and-whistles, but they are all well made to very high standards from great materials. We have had many discussions here about the lack on M6 Leicas of that buttery shutter advance so notable on earlier Leicas. The reason was that earlier Leicas used bronze gears which easily lapped in to each other but did not last long enough, so Leitz replaced them with steel gears, and these take decades to lap in. I suspect my late Wetzlar M6 will be as buttery in its advance as is my M3 in another three decades or so! But I'll have a bunch of worn-out M3 gears to replace in the interim. Zeiss Ikon went with steel gears from the get-go with a few exceptions, and the exceptions are gears which do not bear heavy loads. The East German arm of Zeiss Ikon renovated Hubert Nerwin's project for a Contax SLR and produced it after the War as the Contax S. Peter Dechert, who began his professional life shooting a Contax S and Hasselblad 1000F, comments in his monograph on the camera about the complexity of the gear train and how shoddily it seems to be made, due to lack of good materials and of machine tooling which hadn't been worked long beyond its use-by date due to wartime requirements -- and then even he admits that the only major weakness in the system is the cord pulling up the mirror and that these cameras, for all of the warning signs of incipient failure, just keep on keeping on. A Contax II is a joy forever. And it was the Expedition Camera for the 1953 British conquest of Everest, though that picture on the top of Tenzing was taken with a Prewar Retina with a Zeiss Tessar lens, and shot on Kodachrome, to boot. Marc msmall@aya.yale.edu Cha robh b?s fir gun ghr?s fir! NEW FAX NUMBER: +540-343-8505