So why did the Contax RF die?

[luigi bertolotti]

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Yup. I also used a Nikon F at the same time as M3 and Leicaflex. I found the different directions of shutter control, focus, and diaphram too confusing for any but the most leisurely use, so sold the excellent Nikon. I also had the use of a Contarex for a while. That was a superb camera, possibly the best ever 35mm SLR for sheer quality. I also bought a new Kiev (Contax copy) in 1983 or so , for $(Aust)85. The lens was pretty good, but the camera's film wind and shutter seem to have been made by the gulag blacksmith.

 

It was a pity the Zeiss serious 35 mm cameras were allowed to die out.

 

John.

 

Yes... but they paid a huge fee for the terrible industrial mistakes that they, and no one else, did... : at a certain timeframe (mid '60s) they had THREE 35mm SLR systems (Contarex, Icarex, Contaflex) COMPLETELY DIFFERENT one to the other... probably with not a single mechanical component in common... and even the plates with logos were different, different lenses from different factories... in a moment in which the reflex 35 was well on its way to become the standard camera for a big share of users, allowing to engineer a finely tuned product line, to adress consumers and pros with big scale economies (as Canon, Nippon Kogaku, Asahi did), they followed the definitely wrong patch... and went to death... Leitz did suffer, saw a big share of the pro market going away from them... Company lost its roots as a family business...but kept the best of its technical heritage and, at the end, did survive.

 

I love a lot my Contarex Super, my Planar, my Distagon 18 (!!!), my Olympia Sonnar 250 (!!!)... it is the only SLR i used regularly, years ago... but going out with it is not as going out with my IIIf... with the Barnack, you feel to use a tool that is aged in many details, but works like any modern film camera... with the 'Rex you feel to handle and use a superb piece that definitely belongs to past...

Edited February 8, 2012 by luigi bertolotti

[sandro]

Wilson, thanks a lot for bringing this up! I was trying to find out a bit more about the competition for Leica after WW II. It struck me that several other rangefinder camera's looked rather complicated and difficult to produce. Several of you mentioned this already. I got the feeling Zeiss was indeed continuing with a pre-war design and apparently couldn't or didn't want to change that line of development. Zeiss SLR camera's look as complicated to me as their RF camera's, which doesn't say much about the quality as such. But the Contax IIIA doesn't look like a camera that you toss in the bag in a hurry. Did the ergonomics of the Leica M win, even though this meant the M-line could hardly be brought up to date. The increased lens quality seems to have highly supported the simple and apaeling Leica M design.

Lex

[adan]

1) Camera lines die for a simple reason - they aren't "worth it" any more to the companies making them. Which by extension means they aren't worth it anymore to enough photographers.

 

Same for Canon/Nikon/Konica/Minolta RFs. Same for the Leica SLRs. Same for the Kyocera "Contaxes" - which were pure Yashica engineering (very good Yashica, to be sure). With cosmetics by Porsche Design. Not a camera made by Zeiss; a camera made to take Zeiss lenses (like Hasselblad, Rollei, Sony).

 

What constitutes "worth it" is not strictly a question of profit or loss, but of relative profit. If you are Zeiss in 1964, and you have DM15,000,000 to invest in R&D for the year, will you do better spending it to keep your rangefinders alive in an era when the world is going to SLRs - or putting it into more advanced lenses for your big customer Hasselblad?

 

2) As to the Contax rangefinders - the (perhaps apocryphal) story is that when Leica turned up at PhotoKina 1954 with the M3, the president of Zeiss went over to the Leica booth, shook the hand of Ernst Leitz III, and said, "You win!"

 

Zeiss never did come up with a multiple-view-incorporated Contax camera to compete with the M3, M2, Nikon SP, etc. They just let the line fade away while focusing their efforts on better markets.

[wlaidlaw]

Zeiss is sure an odd company to deal with. I suspect too many scientists promoted to management positions, when they should have been left beavering away in their ivory towers. As Luigi says, to have three different SLR systems running simultaneously in the 60's was just insane. Lucky that they are a very rich organisation or they would have gone bust years ago. Even their latest compact binoculars, although excellent, are often very strange looking in comparison to the nice looking Leica ones.

 

To have developed a new film RF camera in 2003/4 (the Ikon), was plain looney tunes.

 

The Contax RF looked very old fashioned compared with the M3 by 1953 and the VF was in comparison, plain poor. The only thing it had going for it was a semi coupled meter on the IIIA but in reality, it was no better than a Leicameter.

 

Wilson

[adan]

I believe that Leica hired away Contarex (or at least Zeiss-Ikon) engineers to design the Leicaflex - you see a lot of similar over-engineering between the two (in terms of complexity) - cams, ye gods, instead of Nikon's simple fork-and-lever.

[steed]

Hello all

As part of my ongoing plan to constantly invest in the technology of yesterday, I have both a Contax II and a Contarex Bullseye, and have used them both a number of times. While they are beautiful architecture, and have great lenses, as users they are both pigs compared to the Leica III and Leicaflex. Note: the M is so far superior as a user to the Contax II that there is nothing to discuss. I will say that the Contarex optics have in my opinion never been equaled, but the camera does not want to be used quickly, and has many stupid features (no click stops on the aperture, lousy gearing to focus with, invisible shutter speeds, delicate wind, removable back, central focus screen). The same is true of the Contax, and I far prefer a screw mount to the awkward bayonet mount. The Zeiss products were/are superb for arm-chair photography, but in a moving world, Leica beats them hands down. In saying this, I am willing to concede the superiority of some Zeiss optics. By the way, I also exercise my Ikoflex (no comparison in ease of use to a Rollei), and my two Contaflexes (easy but slow to use)

John W

[luigi bertolotti]

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I believe that Leica hired away Contarex (or at least Zeiss-Ikon) engineers to design the Leicaflex - you see a lot of similar over-engineering between the two (in terms of complexity) - cams, ye gods, instead of Nikon's simple fork-and-lever.

 

Quite reasonable... after all, even Oskar Barnack was employed by Zeiss before reaching Wetzlar...

[wlaidlaw]

Zeiss managers must have sat down one day in the mid 1960's and said to themselves "how can we irritate one of our best customers (Franke and Heidecke) by making an obsolete and rapidly becoming unfashionable type of camera, which competes with their main product?" Luckily for the relationship, the camera was so laughably poor that it must have caused amazed bemusement in Braunschweig rather than annoyance. If Zeiss had wanted to see how to make a real competitor in the TLR market, they only had to look at the Mamiyaflex, which came out in 1957.

 

Wilson

[giordano]

cams, ye gods, instead of Nikon's simple fork-and-lever.

 

I always thought that was because Leicas had always used a cam to couple the lens to the body, so they did the same out of habit on the Leicaflex. Even the f/number cam follower on the original Leicaflex is in the same position as the RF cam follower on a Leica!

[ganzosrevenge]

Yes... but they paid a huge fee for the terrible industrial mistakes that they, and no one else, did... : at a certain timeframe (mid '60s) they had THREE 35mm SLR systems (Contarex, Icarex, Contaflex) COMPLETELY DIFFERENT one to the other... probably with not a single mechanical component in common... and even the plates with logos were different, different lenses from different factories... in a moment in which the reflex 35 was well on its way to become the standard camera for a big share of users, allowing to engineer a finely tuned product line, to adress consumers and pros with big scale economies (as Canon, Nippon Kogaku, Asahi did), they followed the definitely wrong patch... and went to death... Leitz did suffer, saw a big share of the pro market going away from them... Company lost its roots as a family business...but kept the best of its technical heritage and, at the end, did survive.

 

I love a lot my Contarex Super, my Planar, my Distagon 18 (!!!), my Olympia Sonnar 250 (!!!)... it is the only SLR i used regularly, years ago... but going out with it is not as going out with my IIIf... with the Barnack, you feel to use a tool that is aged in many details, but works like any modern film camera... with the 'Rex you feel to handle and use a superb piece that definitely belongs to past...

 

Zeiss' technical problems aren't just because of the "nature of the beast", but also because Zeiss and Leica were always at war over patents. A patent would be granted and then the other company would have to come up with some fantastically complex means of circumventing it. Most famously, the Contarex' shutter as described by Henry Scherer is considered nightmarish in and of itself. However, the Contaflex, Icarex, and the Contarex also have the problem that you mentioned of having zero common parts.

 

I suspect this is because Zeiss wanted its clientele to feel the quality they had spent. If we think about it, Contarex could arguably become "Contax Rex" or "King of the Contaxes" and as such be the "cost-be-damned" model, whereas the contaflex is more of the mainstream "Contax Reflex" (which would mean Leicaflex = Leica Reflex), and Icarex, if logic is correct, would be the lightweight and agile SLR (a la Icarus). Did you want a lightweight SLR, a middleweight SLR, or an exquisitely made, but VERY heavy SLR that had more mechanical complications than a Patek Philippe Watch?. That was what Zeiss offered with so many distinct models in the 1960s. It's not unlike Nikon with its FA / FG, FE / FM and F3 lines of the 1980s, but with much more complexity, more robust builds, and zero parts interchangeability (I own an F3 and a L-Flex SL... hence the Nikon Reference).

 

Zeiss is sure an odd company to deal with. I suspect too many scientists promoted to management positions, when they should have been left beavering away in their ivory towers. As Luigi says, to have three different SLR systems running simultaneously in the 60's was just insane. Lucky that they are a very rich organisation or they would have gone bust years ago. Even their latest compact binoculars, although excellent, are often very strange looking in comparison to the nice looking Leica ones.

 

To have developed a new film RF camera in 2003/4 (the Ikon), was plain looney tunes.

 

The Contax RF looked very old fashioned compared with the M3 by 1953 and the VF was in comparison, plain poor. The only thing it had going for it was a semi coupled meter on the IIIA but in reality, it was no better than a Leicameter.

 

Wilson

 

The RF Zeiss Developed in 2003 / 2004 Isn't part of the Zeiss that existed from the 1840s to the 1970s, it's an affiliate of Cosina (the same company that makes the zeiss-branded lenses in every mount except R mount). They are great cameras optically, but in terms of build quality and "that feel", sorely lacking.

 

I believe that Leica hired away Contarex (or at least Zeiss-Ikon) engineers to design the Leicaflex - you see a lot of similar over-engineering between the two (in terms of complexity) - cams, ye gods, instead of Nikon's simple fork-and-lever.

 

You owe me a new monitor, owning an F3 and a Leicaflex, I can relate to overengineering versus simple and effective (I cracked up at the thought of Leica hiring Zeiss' SLR engineers and spat water on it ). At least Leica had the good sense not to put in that blasted aperture wheel from hell... it is novel, but I bet the repairs stemming from that alone took away a good chunk of Zeiss' bottom line.

 

I always thought that was because Leicas had always used a cam to couple the lens to the body, so they did the same out of habit on the Leicaflex. Even the f/number cam follower on the original Leicaflex is in the same position as the RF cam follower on a Leica!

 

And thankfully after the L-Flex standard, they didn't try to stuff an M3 into an SLR, but rather made an attempt at a proper SLR (though i would *LOVE* to own a Leicaflex Standard).

 

Jason

[wlaidlaw]

Jason,

 

Zeiss must have chucked a fair number of yen in Mr. Kobayashi's direction to get him to make a new magnesium die-cast frame for the Ikon and to design a new long base rangefinder for it. I am sure they will come to be seen as collectors items in a few years time, due to rarity.....but really when Konica had already just failed with the technically superior M mount Hexar RF camera (designed by the same bureau which had done the G1 & 2 for goodness sake), the powers that be must have been bonkers to have authorised the Ikon. I had an Ikon on beta test for about 2 months. It was OK but nothing special and the finish/quality of construction was not as good as the G1 and 2 I also had at that time. I suspect, it would have cost Zeiss less to complete the design of the G3D, than it cost to design the Ikon but given the complete break down in the Zeiss Kyocera relationship, that was never going to happen. I suspected at the time that there might have been a bit of stirring of that pot emanating from Nagano.

 

Wilson

[luigi bertolotti]

Zeiss managers must have sat down one day in the mid 1960's and said to themselves "how can we irritate one of our best customers (Franke and Heidecke) by making an obsolete and rapidly becoming unfashionable type of camera, which competes with their main product?" Luckily for the relationship, the camera was so laughably poor that it must have caused amazed bemusement in Braunschweig rather than annoyance. If Zeiss had wanted to see how to make a real competitor in the TLR market, they only had to look at the Mamiyaflex, which came out in 1957.

 

Wilson

 

One of the smartest designs of a 6x6, and the best way to overcome the limits of TLRs in lens interchangability... much time has passed... but when I used a lot my Rollei 3,5F, I seriously thought to scout around for a C220 or 330...

Diane Arbus, if I remember correctly, used them a lot.

[ganzosrevenge]

Jason,

 

Zeiss must have chucked a fair number of yen in Mr. Kobayashi's direction to get him to make a new magnesium die-cast frame for the Ikon and to design a new long base rangefinder for it. I am sure they will come to be seen as collectors items in a few years time, due to rarity.....but really when Konica had already just failed with the technically superior M mount Hexar RF camera (designed by the same bureau which had done the G1 & 2 for goodness sake), the powers that be must have been bonkers to have authorised the Ikon. I had an Ikon on beta test for about 2 months. It was OK but nothing special and the finish/quality of construction was not as good as the G1 and 2 I also had at that time. I suspect, it would have cost Zeiss less to complete the design of the G3D, than it cost to design the Ikon but given the complete break down in the Zeiss Kyocera relationship, that was never going to happen. I suspected at the time that there might have been a bit of stirring of that pot emanating from Nagano.

 

Wilson

 

Right, and that to me isn't the same zeiss, since Zeiss was shut down before being resurrected as a name by Yashica. As for the Contax G1 and G2, I would have been more proud to put the Zeiss Ikon logo on those two, then on the rangefinder which to me has very little mojo.

 

Jason

[wlaidlaw]

Jason,

 

At least the Kyocera/Contax products (with some early assistance from the Porsche Design Bureau - Butzi Porsche) were eminently worthy of the Contax name. The RX, RTS II & III would certainly have been contenders for the best SLR/lens combination of their time. Their wide/medium zooms in particular were without peer. I slightly regret selling both my RX and RTSII. However in 2006, I had an M8 to buy and the Contax cameras and lenses were still fetching very good money.

 

The Tix was a lovely little camera. My son's one got run over by a Jeep when he was working on a project with the Hmong hill tribes. It still worked just fine once the mud was cleared out of the lens sliding cover.

 

Wilson

[LeicaIIIfContaxIIa]

Am 24.6.2010 um 20:43 schrieb wlaidlaw:

I wonder why Contax has died.

Hope you don't mind that I take up a 12-year-old thread again... 🙊 please don't blame me - but I think the topic itself might be timeless. Recently I had the pleasure to compare one of my Contaxes, the IIa, to a friend's Leica M2.

Am 24.6.2010 um 20:43 schrieb wlaidlaw:

The IIF looks better made, notwithstanding that the Contax was far more expensive (1954 prices: IIF with 50/2 Summitar $700, Contax IIA with 50/1.5 Sonnar $1,200). [...] Zeiss just did not update the camera enough from the 1930's model. What was on sale in 1961, was to all intents and purposes, the same camera as 1934 with some very minor improvements.

Right - a simiilar camera to that from 1936. There is not such a big difference between my 1936 Contax II (from its first year of production) and my 1950 Iia.

Just one real difference: The post-war shutter is much much more quiet. I love that. It's even more quiet than the shutter of my friend's M2.

But when M3 came up in 1954, the Contax was over.

As for the 1954 prices: Sorry I only have found historic German prices - but while the abovementioned combination of IIa with Sonnar 1:1.5 costed 925 Marks the IIa with Sonnar 1:2.0 costed 846 Marks. So maybe in the US an imported camera of this kind might have costed about 1.097 US$. Still much more expensive than Leica IIf (no IIIf, I know).

Am 8.2.2012 um 23:21 schrieb sandro:

I got the feeling Zeiss was indeed continuing with a pre-war design and apparently couldn't or didn't want to change that line of development. [...] the Contax IIIA doesn't look like a camera that you toss in the bag in a hurry.

I'd say, more or less perhaps. But I must say that some years ago my IIa has fallen about 1.2 meters deep on the ground, a meadow (fortunately...! 🫣 ). It still worked afterwards, without problems. I wouldn't have expected that.

As for the pre-war Contax II: Robert Capa used two of them on D-Day taking the Magnificent Eleven. So it must have been a robust tool. And when Capa died unfortunately in Indochinese war in 1954, he used, among other cameras, a post-war IIa.

Maybe the Contax has suffered from World War II with its consequences and from Nazi dictatorship:

• Zeiss Ikon lost more than one skillful technician who had to leave Germany to escape from the German's Nazi terror against Jews. At least Contax co-founder Hans Padelt lost his job. And Zeiss Ikon General Director Emanuel Goldberg had to escape to France, afterwards to Palestine, to save his life.

• After the Germans had overrun the Soviet Union with war and terror and killed 20 million people, the Soviets famously occupied Dresden and relocated the entire Contax camera production to Kiev as reparations. After what they had experienced with the Germans, you can't blame them. Here you can find an internal zeiss letter from 1945, which is remarkable because it shows that attempts were made to re-establish Contax production in Dresden. They literally had to start from scratch - from memory. The engineers hoped to be able to resume production after nine months, in Summer of 1946. But they never succeeded.

• This shows how much expertise had been lost - and how much work it must have taken to construct the IIa/IIIa in Stuttgart after 1945. Without the German dictatorship and without the war instigated by the Germans, Zeiss Ikon would certainly have built a more advanced camera in 1950 in Dresden than Zeiss Ikon Stuttgart did with the IIa/IIIa.

Am 9.2.2012 um 00:00 schrieb wlaidlaw:

The Contax RF looked very old fashioned compared with the M3 by 1953 and the VF was in comparison, plain poor.

Absolutely - the IIa/IIIa's viewfinder looks same (to me) like the pre-war finder. Maybe for the reasons mentioned above.

Am 9.2.2012 um 01:55 schrieb steed:

I far prefer a screw mount to the awkward bayonet mount

First I actually had to practice a bit to change lenses quickly on this bayonet mount 😉. By the way, I wonder if Zeiss Ikon might have set up the strange feature of fixing the internal bayonet at "Infinite" to make it easy to unmount the 50 mm lenses from the internal bayonet: Without fixing, this would get even more tricky 🙃.

As soon as you use a wide-angle or telephoto lens, the bayonet is not longer fixed at Infinite. Those lenses - which are set on the external bayonet - are easier to unmount in general.

Michael

[Anbaric]

8 minutes ago, LeicaIIIfContaxIIa said:

As for the pre-war Contax II: Robert Capa used two of them on D-Day taking the Magnificent Eleven. So it must have been a robust tool. And when Capa died unfortunately in Indochinese war in 1954, he used, among other cameras, a post-war IIa.

Though it probably says something that he also had a Nikon S with him when he died. I wonder what he would have used if he had survived? Probably whatever tool got the job done. Capa was only 40, and might have had a long career ahead of him. The M3 had been unveiled a month earlier, and the Nikon F would follow 5 years later.

[250swb]

37 minutes ago, Anbaric said:

Though it probably says something that he also had a Nikon S with him when he died. I wonder what he would have used if he had survived? Probably whatever tool got the job done. Capa was only 40, and might have had a long career ahead of him. The M3 had been unveiled a month earlier, and the Nikon F would follow 5 years later.

Capa may well have gone on to use the Nikon SP that had a six frame viewfinder in 1957, and then the Nikon F that evolved from it in 1959. And if anything truly great evolved from Contax to Nikon mount through camera evolution it was the F mount. It would be rude to say how long it took Leica to catch up with a six frame finder or an SLR worthy of competing with Nikon.

[LeicaIIIfContaxIIa]

vor 14 Stunden schrieb Anbaric:

I wonder what he would have used if he had survived?

I'm definitely sure he soon would have replaced his former Contax RF with a Leica M3. I remember to have read that he had already used a Leica II or III at times. For a professional, the M must have been state of the art in 1954, the Contax IIa had been state of the art in 1950 when photo industry and technical development had not yet recovered from the war.

I just had mentioned Robert Capa on D-Day to demonstrate that the Contax II does seem to have been a robust tool back then. I suppose it might still be robust even nowadays after having been set up by a guy like Henry Scherer or one of his skillful colleagues.

My Contax II is at a German workshop at the moment, I hope to get it back in a robust state, too, to take pictures with it again 😎. (Of course a Leica M2 or 3 would be better - but with all those lenses it's too expensive for me 😉 .)

Edited September 30, 2024 by LeicaIIIfContaxIIa

[UliWer]

vor 1 Stunde schrieb LeicaIIIfContaxIIa:

My Contax II is at a German workshop at the moment

I also have a II but the rangefinder is completely off focus - though the shutter is excellent. Can you please tell where your‘s is being repaired? 

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Hallo,

Look here: Interesting Leica gear

[Anbaric]

I suppose it's natural for us to assume Capa would have returned to Leica (which he had used in the Spanish Civil War) when the M series became available, and he might well have done, but some prominent photojournalists continued to use their Nikon rangefinders into the 1960s. Steve Schapiro's pictures of Martin Luther King were taken with Nikon S series cameras, and Bob Jackson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald was too.