Zeiss Contaflex Beta

[luisalegria]

I've had this little beauty for a while -



The Contaflex Beta was one of the cheaper line of Contaflex, with the Pantar instead of the Tessar, and its own front-cell replaceable tele and wide angle lenses (I don't have these). The Beta is the version with the built-in uncoupled meter.

So whats odd about this one ? Well, simply put, unlike most 50+ year old cameras, on this one - EVERYTHING STILL WORKS !

The meter meters accurately, the shutter works fine, it doesn't suffer from the Contaflex curse of the sticky diaphragm, slow speeds are OK, etc. What are the odds of that ? And a good thing too, as I understand that these are almost impossible to fix.

The uncoupled-metering system is curious to modern eyes, but not uncommon in those days, on cameras and light meters - you turned the meter dial until the indicator matched the meter reading and you read off the exposure value - from 3-18 on this one.



And here's the neat part - then you set the exposure value on the coupled shutter-diaphragm control -



And then as you change the aperture the coupled shutter adjusts to retain the exposure value. Weird, but it works. And no batteries.

Some samples, Fujicolor

[Orio]

[luisalegria]

Ah, but even these Zeiss seem mostly to have something wrong with them, sad to say. The Contaflexes, Bessamatics and probably worst of all the Retina Reflexes all had the same type of shutter/diaphragm design and it has always been a problem.

The odd thing about the camera meter is because it uses the exposure value (EV), which is also a separate scale on the shutter-aperture dials. The meter does not give you f-stop and shutter-speed. So on this one you set EV directly on the camera and it couples all f-stops and speeds to that EV.

This EV value was a fashion sometime in the 1950's, and there were some other cameras that had the EV-scale.

Your regular lightmeter would be giving you f-stops and shutter speeds, or at least you would have to translate EV to them to set them on the camera.

[Laurence]

I see nothing bu GREAT on these images! And my version of the Pantar (with the Contaflex 126) has shown EXCELLENT color and sharpness!

GREAT buy!

[LucisPictor]

These two shots that you show are fantastic!!!

[A G Photography]

The first one especially is great, it would sell very well as stock *hint * hint *

[rick_oleson]

I have a Prima with the 30, 45 and 75mm lenses. The Pantar lenses, while not as sharp as the Tessars of the top line, are really very good picture takers. And, since one of the sources of reliability problems in Contaflexes is the shutter linkages that have to accommodate the movement of the shutter during focusing, the front-cell-focusing Pantars result in a camera that gives a bit less trouble than its more expensive siblings. My Prima isn't perfect, but I wouldn't trade it for a Super.