I have a good working Contax I that I bought from Yves Mascence. Yves Mascence was director of Leica France in the 1980's.
He was a good friend of Henri Cartier-Bresson, a painter who made from time to time photographs.
But that Contax I is a miracle. The only good working Contax I I've ever seen.
Erik.
His family name is Maxence not "Mascence". As for his friendship with HCB : maybe, maybe not. Yves M. liked to enlight things a little bit.
😉
The Contax I is a kind of a prototype marketed in a hurry. The Contax II is the real Contax. It is way more reliable than the Contax I, this is day and night between the two. And more reliable than the IIa, too. Probably the most ahead of its time rangefinder camera. We'll never know what would have happened if the Zeiss Ikon factory of Dresden hadn't been totally destroyed in 1945 under the English bombs. The IIa, as an evolution of the II, is plagued with many design flaws indeed. Remember, it has been designed during the war by an ingeneers team whose leaders flew to the USA when the war got over, and got marketed in 1950 only, with all its dumb and dumber mechanics still under the top cover.
Besides the unavoidable shutter ribbons replacement job which had to be performed from time to time on the Contax II, this camera was something exceptional indeed.
The most true thing to say is, that at the time of the Barnacks, the Zeiss lenses for the Contax were miles ahead of the Leitz lenses as for pure optical performances. Leitz had neither any good 5cm f/1.5 - or even f/2 - nor any sharp 35mm (and no 35mm faster than f/3.5). As for lenses, Leitz came on par with Zeiss in 1954 only. This is why many Barnacks users used to mount Sonnars and Biogons in LTM on their bodies, or even such lenses in their original Contax RF mount, using the Cooke & Perkins adapter (the ancestor of the Amedeo adapter).
The rest belongs to the universal history. Speaking of the camera bodies made by the two companies between 1932 and 1949, and debating on which was better than the other, is of very little interest if only any.
In the excellent and beautiful book "Kodachrome and how to use it" by Ivan Dmitri, published by Simon and Schuster in 1940, the two systems are presented. Reading how both those two German systems were described by people knowing that they were talking about at the time they were sold new, and before the USA got involved in the WWII, is more interesting, at the end of the day.
