The Zeiss Contaflex cameras are well known to, shall we say, more "mature photographers". They were a series of leaf-shuttered SLRs in the Fifties and Sixties.
What most people don’t realize is that the first Contaflex was a very unusual twin-lens reflex (TLR) camera that used 35mm film rather than the usual 120 (6x6) roll film, and featured a focal plane shutter and interchangeable lenses – at least for the taking lens. The fields for other lenses were etched into the viewfinder screen.
It was also the first camera with a built-in selenium exposure meter, which was hidden under its nameplate. Zeiss had already patented a coupled meter at the time, but it was not included in the Contaflex as the engineers deemed it “too complicated”.
Thus the meter (seen on the top, to the left of the viewfinder) required the photographer to read the meter and manually transfer the shutter and lens settings to the camera.
This first Contaflex appeared in 1935, though production stopped at the start of World War II.
After the war, in 1953, Zeiss Ikon (based in Stuttgart, West Germany) produced the first of what would be a long line of Contaflex 35mm leaf-shuttered SLR cameras, employing the newly-developed Compur reflex shutter.
Such shutter mechanisms require the shutter to be open for viewing. When the shutter release is pressed, they close and allow the mirror to lift out of the way, before reopening and closing again, to make the exposure. If it sounds complex, well, it is!
The reason a leaf shutter was chosen, rather than the focal-plane shutters favored by the Japanese, was simply because by then, Zeiss owned both the Prontor and Compur shutter-making factories.
These first Contaflex cameras had a fixed 45mm f/2.8 Tessar lens with simple front-element focusing. (The Tessar brand name comes from the Greek word “tessar”, meaning four, as the Tessars are a four-element design.)
Later models had a proper helical thread, which moved the entire lens for focusing, along with “convertible lenses” where the rear element remained behind the shutter, but the front elements could be exchanged for different ones, changing the focal length.
This limited the designs to between 35 and 115mm with a maximum f/4 aperture. At the time this was not considered a drawback, as almost nobody but pros ever bought accessory lenses.
The last hurrah for the Contaflex line came in 1967, with the introduction of the Zeiss Contaflex 126 – whose only relation to the rest of the Contaflex family is its name. It accepted Kodak 126 (Instamatic) cartridges, one of very few ambitious cameras to use that film. It had a focal plane shutter and seven dedicated lenses.
Lenses for the Contaflex 126 are often confused with lenses for other Contaflex cameras, but they can only be used on the 126 body. It, of course, can only use the obsolete 126 cartridge, so the value of these lenses is not very high despite their famous names.
Zeiss presented its new, top-of-the-line Contarex at Photokina in the fall of 1958, with deliveries promised for spring 1959, but it was not generally available until March 1960.
The Contarex was the first 35mm, focal-plane-shutter SLR to provide direct meter coupling to the shutter, aperture and film-speed settings, which were interconnected by cords.
The camera had an “aperture simulator”, or iris, in front of the selenium meter cell. It was a “match-needle” system, in which the user aligned the meter needle with an index triangle that is visible both in a top plate window and, to the right, in the viewfinder.
This original Contarex quickly gained the nicknames of the “Bullseye” or “Cyclops” due the prominent position of the selenium light meter.
The Contarex was a wonder (or a nightmare) of German engineering and manufacture, with a weight and a cost to match. Including the 50mm f/2 Carl Zeiss Planar standard lens, it sold for DM1,450 – or roughly $450.
That’s over $100 more than a Nikon F that had reached the market a year earlier, in March 1959 – and it's the equivalent of roughly $4,000 today!
Read more of David Young's ongoing series on classic cameras
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