Sorry for the delay. However, as I sometimes take the trouble to point out, this stuff doesn't write itself.
Taking up where we left off...
In 1982, the year the Contax RTS II was introduced, the "heavy metal" rocker Ozzy Osbourne bit the head off a bat onstage. What will now permanently be the bestselling album in history, Michael Jackson's Thriller, came out, in November. Martina Navratilova won 90 of 93 tennis matches, and North Carolina won the NCAA Men's College Basketball tournament with the help of a freshman sensation then known as Mike Jordan. AT&T, colloquially called "Ma Bell," was ordered to be broken up. A movie called E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was helping Steven Spielberg earn $500,000 a day. On the Mall in Washington, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, designed by a young unknown named Maya Lin, was dedicated. It was so stark that a figurative statue called "Three Soldiers," which was not part of Lin's design, had to be added two years later to placate detractors. (Lin's somber Memorial, now widely admired, is no longer controversial.) On January 14th, Air Florida flight 90 hit the 14th Street Bridge shortly after taking off from what was then called National Airport, and plunged into the freezing Potomac River, killing 78 people, including both pilots and four motorists on the bridge. A day later, "shock jock" Howard Stern called Air Florida on the air and asked to buy a ticket to the 14th Street Bridge, for which he was fired*. Thelonious Monk, Philip K. Dick, Leonid Brezhnev, and John Belushi were among those who died that year, as well as Princess Grace of Monaco, formerly the American movie star Grace Kelly. She died when she suffered a cerebral hemorrhage behind the wheel and drove off a mountainside. Instead of a "Man [or Woman] of the Year," which had been a big deal since the late 1920s, TIME magazine named the personal computer "Machine of the Year." In the U.S., a gallon of gas cost 91 cents, a loaf of bread cost 50 cents, and the average price of an existing home was $67,800. Argentina invaded the Falklands Islands. Dallas, M*A*S*H, and Hill Street Blues were on American TV, and the young standup comedian David Letterman's first (and still best) late night show, simply called "Late Night," debuted on NBC**. A new and high-tech type of music carrier called the Compact Disc, or CD, a joint effort between Sony and Philips, was first manufactured***. A computer scientist named Scott Fahlman proposed that a colon, hyphen, and close-parenthesis, like this:
:-)
be used as a marker for jokes. It became the first "emoticon," a word Fahlman coined—even though the Russian émigré author Vladimir Nabokov had proposed the same thing way back in 1969, writing, in The New York Times, "I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile—some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket."
Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C....
Far less significantly—well, except to me—I accidentally applied to art school in 1982. I had become obsessed with photography, learning all I could about it on my own. And when I got going learning something, I really got going. I never received an academic degree, but when motivated I could be a ferocious autodidact. I once tried to teach myself Anglo-Saxon, for instance, and got further with it than you might imagine. After many visits to Industrial Photo in suburban Maryland—I would stop on my way home from the University of Maryland, where I was auditing a physics course in optics—I had carefully weighed all the options and finally purchased a Contax 139Q (for "quartz") and a Carl Zeiss Planar 50mm ƒ/1.4 lens, which became my only lens for more than two years.
I was moonlighting at a framer's shop and met a photographer, a customer, who told me about the Corcoran School of Art's Open Program, where she had taken a class. I called the Corcoran, asked to be sent an application for a photography course, and had filled out more than two pages of the application out before I figured out that what they had sent me was an application for the four-year full-time program, which I hadn't even known about. Nothing much was going on in my life; I was living in a group house and working full-time as a handyman at Johnson's Flower Center, a garden center on Wisconsin Avenue, and working evenings and weekends at the frame shop. So I completed the application, was accepted, and entered the Photography BFA program as a second-year student in the Fall.
Naturally, when the RTS II came out and was covered in all the magazines, that became the "dream camera" I really wanted. But not really, because it was beyond my slender means, even though I had been working those two jobs. I considered at the time that the RTS II really should be considered a new camera on account of all its improvements and refinements, or what are now called "upgrades." The shutter on the original RTS of 1975 was known to have some problems, so the RTS II offered a horizontally-traveling new shutter made of titanium—I recall being cautioned never to touch it, as the titanium was very thin and a dented shutter could not be repaired. It inherited quartz-controlled shutter timing, which "trickled up" from my 139Q. I don't know how accurate it was—Dick, at Pro Photo, where most of the photographers in the Washington press corps had their cameras repaired, had a shutter tester, but testing cost $15 and I was a cheapskate. The RTS II had a fully mechanical backup shutter speed, 1/50th sec. (that's the control on the bottom right of the mirror housing, next to the lens), TTL flash, and this, that, and the other thing. You can research an exhaustive list of the differences as easily as I can (i.e., not very easily).
Thoughtful design, innovative tech, and careful engineering
But several things deserve mention. It's remembered that Contax eventually went to great extremes, in the RTS III of 1990 (which really was a completely different camera), to ensure film flatness. The engineers and product managers at Zeiss, one of whom I eventually met, were preoccupied by it, in order to better show off the superiority of their lenses. The RTS III's vacuum back sucked the film flat against the pressure plate before every shot, an engineering nicety that might have appealed to buyers conceptually, even though it's doubtful that any of them ever were able to detect the difference visually. This is almost lost to history now, and I don't know that anyone still cares, but that concern with film flatness was already being addressed way back in the RTS II. The back and film path were carefully engineered, with such features as an oversized, extremely high-tolerance pressure plate made of a special material, and an oversized takeup spool.
Looks perfectly ordinary, but in this case looks are deceiving.
A lot of the differences were things that seem to have been of concern only in terms of "feature competition" at the time—for example, interchangeable focusing screens. The RTS II had no fewer than eight available! But who cares? Who could care? It was simply something that buyers were looking at back them, ticking off their feature lists as they did their shopping. Soon enough, it stopped mattering—feature proliferation was just about to take off in a much bigger way, as we'll see in the next post. The salient point on that score is that the RTS II shipped with a standard focusing screen that differed from the usual. Most cameras at the time had a central circle consisting of a split-image inside a microprism "collar." The RTS II shipped with a standard screen that had a center spot of microprism only—no split image. Of course, various other screens were among the seven additional options, including your choice of a horizontal or 45°-angle split image. If your heart's desire is to make yourself crazy, try finding those now. The RTS II lost some of those comparisons, too—for example, the flash sync speed, soon to become a competition, was only 1/60th, and several other pro cameras of the era featured exchangeable prism housings—only the Leica R4 and the Contax did not.
The RTS II shared with the RTS its then-unique electromagnetic shutter release, which was very light and very precise compared to the competition. At the time it had the effect of spoiling you for anything else, although it's difficult to recover that sense in today's world. I can't seem to find the spec, but my memory is that it offered the shortest shutter-button travel and the lowest shutter lag of any SLR at the time.
But the best features of the camera were both new on the II. Primarily, the prism and the viewfinder were all new, offering 97% coverage vs. 93% in the RTS, and .87X magnification. The prism was engineered with no corners cut whatsoever, and the view through the eyepiece is as close as it gets to perfection. It's bright, even across the field, "snappy" across the whole field (that is, you can detect focus easily anywhere, not the case on the later high-brightness screens). It's large, and offers decent eye relief (I don't seem to find a figure). Most of all, it's supremely clean—all you see is the world through the lens to the edge of the rectangle. In normal shooting there are only two red LED data points in the finder, the shutter speed on the right and the aperture underneath, both outside the image area—but you're not even presented with those unless you want to be. (If in use, exposure compensation, AE/manual mode indication, AE lock, overexposure warning, flash data and battery check are also visible.) It can stand as well as anything as the high-water mark of camera viewfinders, not just among SLRs, not just of that era, but of 35mm cameras overall. Shoot with it for a while and you'll see just how much we have lost with the insanely cluttered and confused finder views of most of today's digital marvels.
The other feature that's really nice and that I've never seen elsewhere is the very effective AE lock system. To see the finder information, you don't half-press the shutter—the information only briefly appears in the finder as the shutter is being pressed. Rather, you press a button on the front of the camera body to turn the finder information on—for 16 seconds, to prevent battery drain. The nifty thing is that there's a very handy collar switch around this button which permanently locks any shutter speed value once you activate it, and holds it until you switch it off again. It's highly convenient, very practical, and efficient. I'll go so far as to wax hyperbolic and say it's probably the best AE lock system ever devised.
And now the other shoe drops
The cameras that the RTS II competed with in its era were the Nikon F3 (1980—one of my studio partners had one, which he called Darth Vader), Canon New F-1 (1981—my brother bought one), Pentax LX (1980—I've owned several, and still have one now) and Leica R4 (1980—I've rented one of those too, although the one I bought for myself was the R4s). I'm pleased to report that after graduating from the Corcoran School of Art Photography Department, I got a job as a part-time teacher at a local college, and used that as a stepping stone to a full-time job as a high school photography teacher. Being paid a whopping $17,000 in annual salary (actually the equivalent of $47,600 now, which is hard to believe), I was finally able to buy a brand new Contax RTS II. Was it worth buying then? More importantly, what's the situation now—is this old camera actually recommendable to film shooters today? I'll give you my considered and informed, but hardheaded and realistic, opinion.
But before I do that, I have to say that, unfortunately, all of the foregoing, about the features and technology of the RTS II, is actually beside the real point, and doesn't matter all that much in understanding the camera. To put the RTS II in proper perspective and learn the actual significance of it and of the other top cameras of that era, stay tuned for Part III.
I hope you're enjoying reading this, even if, quite understandably, you don't care much (or at all) about old film cameras.
Mike
*I won't watch or listen to him to this day. If you don't naturally empathize with innocent travelers who suddenly find themselves trapped and drowning in freezing water after a traumatic impact, you're a psychopath, and that's the end of the discussion.
**"Still best," thanks in part to Letterman's head writer and then-girlfriend Merrill Markoe, who deserves credit for a lot of the original features on that show. I had been living without a TV, but I bought one specifically to watch two programs: the 1983 Super Bowl, and Late Night. I later bought a tiny B&W TV with a screen about the size of a piece of 4x5 film. Know why? Because I could put a small sheet of Rubylith—transparent red masking film—over the screen, and watch football games—and Late Night, often enough—in the darkroom.
***I bought twenty of them before I bought my first CD player.
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Featured Comments from:
Rob Griffin: "Your writings on the Contax cameras and the RTS and RTS II are a wonderful read. Great stuff! From the mid-'70s to mid-'80s I worked full time at what I believe was the best camera store in Phoenix, The Guild. I think we may have been the biggest Contax dealer in the Southwest. Your impressions and thoughts about the Contax line are right on point."
Mike Cawley: "Wonderful! My first serious camera was the RTS II. Coupled with the W-2 motor drive, I felt like a real photographer. Didn't have enough $ to buy the III when it was introduced, but managed to handle it at a camera show. It had that same 'solid brick' feeling of quality like the II.
"Keep 'em coming!"