To this thread, let me say, thanks a gazillion!! It got me thinking about, and interested again, in my once-upon-a-time posts here, so I went hunting, and came up with a few old, even historical (please let us not call them hysterical) musings.
One of my (very few, alas) surviving photo diaries goes way, way back to the period 2000-2009. It's online as a would you believe it! WordPro document - I still have that now-ancient software on one of my elderly laptops, so I accessed it and discovered a note I wrote about a post dating to 2006. It was about my Contax G1, I had a problem with this camera and asked for advice about sorting it out.
Several posters came to the rescue and gave me some timely tips. None of which I of course followed up, in my usual way.
So now I invoked the assistance of the search engine, which produced - nothing. It seems all those old old posts and threads have vanished, maybe to lurk somewhere in the far universe as so many electric visual zaps with all the original shows of I Love Lucy and the long-forgotten Hollywood potboiler screen flicks.
I don't even recall the moniker I used then. So much for my long ago much-vaunted elephantine memory, now sadly diminished.
I still have the G1, in fact two of them - in this I'm improving slowly, having once owned four - and the malfunctioning one goes on working as it did 20 years ago. I no longer have the fabulous Zeiss 45/2.0. Someone I knew in Japan wanted it more badly than I did, so I sold it, silly me. It's now AFAIK in Kyoto and in regular use, which pleases me, even if I still miss it.
I make do with the Zeiss 35/2.0 Planar, a less valued lens to many but in my estimation at least 95% as good as the 45. A second G1 has had the 28/2.8 Biogon on it for so long, I'm reluctant to try to take it off as it may be stuck firmly on to that camera.
Also a 21/2.8, a beaut lens, sadly too little used. And a 90/2.8, not quite so nice as the other glass, rarely if ever used, so in pristine condition.
My G1s go on making good pictures, as they did when I invested heavily in the brand in the early 2000s, thanks to a gentleman named Dave Shaw who was then at the Camera Exchange in Melbourne city, who convinced me that the Gs were almost as good as Leicas. Dave will surely be remembered by many as an exceptionally well-informed camera man, a most pleasant and polite seller and always a pleasure to deal with.
It took a while for me to work out the G1's limitations, but Dave sure was right about those Zeiss Contax lenses, they are no less than superb. Alas, with an odd and unique mount so they fit only the Gs. They can be converted, at a ridiculously high cost and only by someone in Japan, who it seems has a two-year backlog to work on, which says something.
