The body is so light that any of the professional C/Y lenses will often double the weight of the set up. A Contax 167MT body without the battery pack is 620 grams. Light! The main draw of the Aria is its size and weight, only 460 grams (without the batteries). Specifications Lens Mountī, 16 sec – 1/4000 (P/A) 4 sec – 1/4000 (Shutter/Manual) By the 1990s, only Leica and Contax were producing high-quality, professional-level, manual-focus-only 35mm film SLRs. For Canon, we would have to go all the way back to the 1986 T90.
Contax rts ii review manual#
One would have to go back to 1990 to find the last similar model produced by Nikon, the extremely underwhelming F-601M (the N6000), a manual focus version of the F-601 (N6006). When autofocus technology substantially improved during the early 1990s, most major manufacturers abandoned the concept of advanced manual focus SLRs with integrated motor drives. During the same era, Nikon also introduced several “retro” manual focus SLRs such as the Nikon FM10 (1996) and the FM3A (2001), and Canon introduced a slew of digital point-and-shoots as well as its EOS-3 SLR. That same year, Nikon introduced its first decent digital point and shoots: the Coolpix 600 and 900 as well as its famous F100. The Aria pretty much combines everything a regular person would want in a film SLR: an integrated motor drive with auto load, advance, and rewind multiple exposure modes multiple metering modes and a few interchangeable focusing screens.īy 1998, although the photography world was quickly moving towards digital, the most advanced film cameras were also simultaneously being produced, like the Nikon F5 and the Canon EOS-1N. Its main attraction is that is light, so light in fact that almost all of the great Contax SLR lenses make the camera decidedly front heavy. Not designed or marketed as a professional’s camera, the Aria shares much design DNA with the prior 1986 167MT and 1994 RX. Unfortunately, neither of these later autofocus bodies are compatible with C/Y lenses. Contax would only release two more new 35mm film SLRs afterwards: the autofocus models N1 (2001) and NX (2002). The 1998-2004 Aria was the last manual-focus 35mm film SLR produced by Kyocera in Japan under the Contax brand name (for the purposes of this statement, we are going to exclude the later de-featured RXII). With its better-than-average viewfinder, a 1/4000 top shutter speed, lightweight construction, and multiple metering modes, it has checked all of the boxes for me when using both C/Y and M42 lenses. The Contax Aria has become my favorite 35mm film SLR.
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