[Leica] Re: Contax innards

[msmall at infionline.net (Marc James Small)]

At 03:20 PM 5/31/06 -0400, Lawrence Zeitlin wrote:

>I've been up to my elbows in Contax grease. I owned a Contax I as a 
>college student and kept it repaired, replacing the tapes several 
>times, degreasing and lubricating with very expensive watch oil, 
>adjusting the shutter speeds and rangefinder. I did the same for a 
>Contax II several years later, not because I couldn't afford it but 
>because I enjoyed playing around with the innards of cameras. Both 
>worked fine after reassembly. I will agree that both were, to quote a 
>phrase often used to describe the cameras, "Nightmares of misplaced 
>mechanical ingenuity." I've had the innards of my Contax IIa apart, 
>mostly because of curiosity. It didn't need more than a bit of 
>cleaning. It worked perfectly from the day I bought it in the late 50s 
>to the present. And I've certainly clicked the shutter far more than 
>10,000 times. That's only 200 exposures a year in the time I've owned 
>it. About a good single long weekend of pictures.

Zeiss Ikon specivically directed that watch oil NOT be used on the innards
of Contax cameras, both  Prewar and Postwar due to its effect on the
shutter tapes when it outgassed.  You probably would have done better to
have followed the factory perscriptiosns!

Amd which camera, a II or a IIa, would you rather haul with you for an
expedition to explore the Ubangi-Shairi River?

Note that Zeiss Ikon offered IIa cameras to the 1953 American climb n
Goodwin-Austen (now more commonly known as K-2), to the Italian climb of
1954 which conquered that peak, and to the 1953 British ascent of Mount
Everest.  All three expeditions declined the offer and employed heavily
used Contax II and III cameras to document their efforts.  

The point remains that the Contax II and III had a well deserved reputation
for reliability, while the IIa and IIIa were seen as the cameras of choice
for advanced amatuers looking for a good weekend camera.  This, in the end,
damned the breed, as Zeiss Ikon flopped repeatedly it he marketplace:  it
barely broke even with its MF cameras (Ikoflices and Ikontae) to the point
where these were killed by 1957, but it stayed afloat through the P&S
Contessa line and through the Contaflex leaf-shutter SLR's.  The commercial
success of these latter cameras actually allowed Zeiss Ikon to break even
in 1954 but, from then until the end in 1972, it was a spiral of increasing
losses.  The Contax IIa and IIIa were horrid disasters financially for
Zeiss Ikon, and the Contarex, that boiling maelstrom of loss, iced the
deal.  Zeiss Ikon was doomed after the introduction of the Contarex in 1959.

Now, had Zeiss Ikon survived the war with the financial security of, say,
Leitz or Franke & Heidecke or even Voigtl?nder, then things might have been
different.  The re-engineered Contax would have been much more of the
nature of the Contax IV prototypes which have survived, and would have been
introduced in 1948 or 1949.  A battle royal between these two might well
have knocked back the Nikon and Canon RF bit.  Und so weiter.

If you want a complex and gear-driven shutter, look to the Contax S, where
the only tape is the one pulling up the reflex mirror when the exposure is
made.  Peter Dechert to the contrary (he is a friend of mine and I have
told him this), I have never had a Contax S or D fail on me desite the
immense complexity of the shutter, and these gears being made on the
worn-out machine tools left tot he East Germans after the Soviets had
"accomodated" the better stuff for their own uses.  A worker who takes
prided in his efforts will produce a quality item despite the constraints
under which he is working.  And the folks cranking out the Contax S and D
cameras were the selfsame guys who had been, a decade earlier, churning out
Contax II and III cameras.

It is obvious, in retrospect, that Zeiss Ikon ought to have sold its soul
in 1947 to a simple P&S Contessa, a leaf-shutter Contaflex SLR, and a
professional-grade Contarex.  But no one realized in 1947 just how much the
SLR was going to dominate the field (the developer of the 35mm SLR, Hubert
Nerwin, had left Zeiss Ikon for the US in 1946;  he was to later produce
the Texax Contax, the Combat Graphic.)  Hindsight is always 20-20.  And
Zeiss and Zeiss Ikon in 1947 were teetering on the narrow edge of fiscal
disaster, so it is remarkable that they chose to invest funds in the Contax
IIa and IIIa designs.

In the end, the Contax II and III were huge proft-makers for Zeiss Ikon.
The Contax IIa and IIIa were dramatically awful loss-leaders fro the mark.

They'd have done better to have avoided the niche at all.

Marc

msmall@aya.yale.edu 
Cha robh b?s fir gun ghr?s fir!