I just got Carl Zeiss 50mm f1.7 by Contax from Ebay. This lens looks good but the coating is not as well as my expected. It “comes” with a pretty old body Contax 139 which was introduced in 1979. Its leather trim has come off a lot by its age.
Since Kyocera discontinued its camera production on April 2005, Contax’s lens has been valuable because of using the Carl Zeiss T* coating technique. Now on Ebay, some Contax lens rarely be found especially 21mm f2.8, 25mm f2.8, 35mm f1.4, etc.
I first met the Contax SLR body Aria when it came out in 1998, its solid body and product finishing impressed me after using a few day. In 2004, I bought a pretty famous and full manual SLR camera, Nikon FM3A for Infrared photography. Comparing to Contax SLR body, I was not happy with the FM3A by it high cost-effective and sold it eventually after finishing my project.
This Contax 139 has little problem with the shutter, I did some research for this issue and cleaned up the body by opening the bottom cover, finally the problem has been fixed. Now I can enjoyed this famous Contax SLR camera with Carl Zeiss 50mm f1.7 lens which also can be used on my Canon 5DMK II body as well.
(Click on the image for better view)
The Contax 139 body before cleaning.
Carl Zeiss 50mm f1.7
The Contax 139 body after cleaning
After fixing
Contax 139 with Carl Zeiss 50mm f1.7