I am a Yashica era Contax tragic. In 135 cameras I have more than I care to admit. I doubt I ever paid more than $US100 for a camera.
The private operator Contax repairs UK does good work. The website, however, seems to have expired. It is archived here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190122064249/www.contaxrepairs.com/ His list of what is and is not repairable refers to complex parts needs and what he wants to work on and may not reflect what is entirely possible.
All the manual focus Yashica-Contax cameras apart from the Aria have a mirror which is glued into the housing. It will come loose, slip forward and jam the camera. It is referred to as "Contax mirror slip". The Aria and the N cameras don't do it.
The autofocus in the N cameras is slow, hunts a lot and is hardly more useful than manual focus. It won't be of much use photographing a child (I do a lot of photos of children).
All the C-Y cameras have bright, big viewfinders with focus screens that make manual focus about as easy as it gets.
The AX is amazing in a hugely overengineered way. It is too big and heavy to really be useable. It weighs about as much as two Nikon F4 cameras (I write it that way because the F4s is an F4 with the MB-21).
The RTS series have amazing viewfinders and interesting and possibly useful features but are still very big and heavy.
The RX and ST are beautiful, incredibly featured and very nice to use. They are still large-ish and heavy cameras.
The Aria is compact, light, nimble and works extremely well without losing the amazing viewfinder.
The Zeiss lenses are a mixed bag of amazing, good and ordinary. Check that the lenses you need are available and affordable. If you need a lens longer than 135mm look elsewhere. The long APO lenses are stratospherically priced and appear for sale very rarely, and the regular long lenses are ordinary to outright poor performers. The lenses between 15 and 100mm all have much to recommend them. The 50/1.4 is legendary and is great for landscapes but wasn't optimised for close up work. The 60mm Makros (the S 1:1 is enormous, the C 1:2 is remarkably light and compact) are essentially unbeatable inside 3m but are not very good at infinity.
Marty
