Monthly Archives: April 2013

Contax II

Cameras

Zeiss Ikon’s finest.

Zeiss’s finest rangefinder 35mm film camera, the Contax II, was manufactured in Germany between 1936 and 1941. I was lucky to borrow a used one from a camera store I worked in during my student days, along with the contemporary Leica IIIc, the Contax with the 50mm Sonnar, the Leica with the 50mm Summar. The Sonnar was far the better lens at f/2 and f/2.8.

The cameras were night and day. One version has it that Zeiss was determined to best the Leica with a more modern design. Another maintains that they had to change the design dramatically to avoid patent infringement. One thing is certain. The Zeiss business dwarfed that of Ernst Leitz, Wetzlar in wealth and breadth, so starting with a blank sheet of paper on the drawing board was no big deal, given Zeiss’s resources.

What emerged was a camera of quite exceptional elegance. Compare with the Leica IIIC:

Where the Leica is all knobs and dials and busyness, the Contax is an integrated whole. The Leica is an unfinished engineer’s design, the Contax a Bauhaus aetheticist’s dream. Not until 1954, when Leitz released the greatest 35mm rangefinder design in history, the Leica M3, was anything comparable to the Contax made.

What prompts this piece is my recent article on The Mexican Suitcase and mention therein of the great war photographer Robert Capa. For when Capa landed on Omaha Beach on D Day in 1944, he was armed with two Contax II cameras and a Rolleiflex. The few images which survived from that reportage are among the most famous war pictures made:


Robert Capa’s unforgettable image of the American
Normandy landing on D Day.

The Leica user of that time had to focus through a rangefinder eyepiece, then change his view to the (awful) viewfinder, using a separate eyepiece. Slow shutter speeds had to be set on the small front dial, after setting the upper dial to a specific index. When the Leica’s shutter was released the upper dial rotated – interfere with it and your exposure would be off. The Leica’s lens had to be screwed in. You had no choice but to rewind the film when your 36 exposures were made.

The Contax changed all that. The rangefinder was brilliantly integrated as a central patch in the viewfinder, one eyepiece for both. All the shutter speeds from 1/2 to 1/1250th (!) of a second were on one large click-stopped dial concentric with the wind-on knob, with the release button elegantly integrated into the center. The clunky ‘lift-turn-drop’ miniscule main shutter speed dial of the Leica with its irregularly spaced settings, which could only be set accurately with the film advanced, was history. Interchangeable film cassettes could be loaded in both the feed and receiving bays, requiring no rewinding. Where the Leica used a horizontally running shutter made of rubberized cloth, the Contax ingeniously opted for a vertically running assembly of interlocking metal slats which permitted faster flash synchronization speeds, though factory flash synch was not added until the post-war Contax IIa/IIIa were released. Copal of Japan were to adapt the design to many Japanese cameras much later.


The Contax II shutter. Click the image for
Mike Elek’s excellent Contax repair site.

You can get a good sense of the quality of the camera’s engineering from Mike Elek’s site.

The lens used a bayonet mount – actually a dual bayonet mount. Shorter lenses fit in the inner mount focused with the small geared wheel in front of the wind-on knob, whereas longer, bulkier ones used the external bayonet claws you can see above, focused with a regular focus collar on the lens. Canon later used the same idea in its post-war Canon 7, where the external mount was used exclusively for its extraordinary f/0.95 50mm optic. The inner Leica screw thread mount used by Canon was too small to accommodate the huge f/0.95 lens.

A modern analogy is apposite. When the iPhone was released in July, 2007 it was a Contax II to every predecessor’s Leica IIIc. Function and form were one.

Only when the Leica M3 came along were all these modern features (save the dual bayonet mount – one bayonet sufficed) incorporated by Wetzlar, who also greatly improved the rangefinder by adding sharply defined edges to the rangefinder patch, suspended finder frames for three focal lengths, and an ingenious parallax compensation mechanism. That was 18 years and a world war later.

While some aver that the shutter in the Contax was more fragile, as the horizontal slats were connected with thin silk tapes which age poorly, contemporary users had no complaints, nor did I when I used this wonderful camera.

Contax simultaneously released the Contax III which added a non-coupled selenium cell exposure meter on the top plate, deemed revolutionary at the time, but in practice it ruined the lovely lines of the model II’s body.

After the war Zeiss released the IIa/IIIa pairing, much the same but maybe even better made. The basic body design was retained through the Contarex SLR range whose complexity and high manufacturing cost did a lot to bankrupt the Zeiss Ikon of old. Those Contarexes retained the dual reloadable cassette chambers, and updated the advance knob with a lever, but the design heritage was obvious for all to see. When the greatest film SLR of all time, the Nikon F, was released many years later that same dual locking/removable baseplate design was retained. It was not ideal – you sometimes wanted a third hand to change film – but it was solid, simple and robust. Compare that to the film baseplate slot-loading mechanism in every film Leica through the last model, the M7, and you will be in no doubt which is the superior system.

Amazingly, Cosina released the Voigtländer R2C in recent years sporting a Contax lens mount along with TTL metering, even if the body was an ugly duckling. The Zeiss aficionado could find new use for his classic Zeiss Ikon lenses:

A handful of modern lenses was also released in the classic Contax mount and adapters are available to use old Voigtländer Prominent lenses – here’s the Prominent’s 50mm f/1.5 Nokton in a handsome semi-matte chrome finish on a Contax II body:

The Contax worked fine for Capa and no one reading this can lay claim to being a better photographer – or a more courageous one. The Contax II is one of the great classics of the 35mm rangefinder camera world.

Update July 203: I just added a Contax IIa, the post-war version, to my home theater display.

The Mexican Suitcase

Photographers

An incredible story.

The Mexican Suitcase refers to three boxes of negatives taken by Gerda Caro, Robert Capa and Chim Seymour (the last two, along with HC-B and George Rodger the founders of Magnum) during the Spanish Civil War which were long thought lost. When they surfaced a few years back and ended up donated by the owner to ICP in New York, still run by Capa’s brother Cornell, the content created an international photographic sensation.

Mercifully Capa’s darkroom technician had an obsessive personality which saw him create three neat boxes with dividers and exquisite inscriptions. Today, were he alive, he would doubtless be writing tedious articles arguing the relative merits of one overpriced MF digital back over another; he would no more be taking pictures now than then. But we should all be grateful for this darkroom jockey’s attention to detail.

The documentary, available on Netflix and Amazon VOD, is a tad idiosyncratic, struggling to keep a well defined story line, but the story is none the less thrilling for all that. Just how the negatives ended up in Mexico and the story of that nation’s special hospitality to many who would otherwise have been chewed up by Franco’s killing machine, is gripping.


The inside cover of one of the three boxes in the Mexican Suitcase.

Taro was killed in the Spanish Civil War, Capa and Chim were both killed in later war zones.


Taro and Capa.

What truly distinguishes the images in this documentary is their startling immediacy. War photography had never been done like this before, the photographer indistinguishable from the soldier save that he had a camera in lieu of a gun.

If you want to see an excellent recreation of what Capa’s style must have been like, I recommend Hemingway and Gellhorn about the time the title characters spent in the Civil War.

Here’s a typical image from the documentary – I’m uncertain which of the three took it:

The LCD price spiral continues

Photography

Lower and lower.

I wrote about my WalMart Superbowl special, the 42″ LCD TV I bought in March 2008, here. I had opted for the then little know Vizio brand, now a household name and very much the price leader to this day. The cost was $900 ex-tax.

That TV is 42″ and 720p/1080i. 1080p was just becoming affordable at that time but still cost $200-300 more at that size and after checking them in the Paso Robes WalMart I simply could not tell the difference at that size.


Vizio VW42L, 720p and $900 in 2008.
Five happy years of service at $15/month.

Well, prices have continued dropping and as with disk drive makers, the manufacture of large display panels has consolidated so that there are maybe three makers left – Samsung and LG of Korea and Sharp in Japan. Sharp has been flirting with bankruptcy for some two years now and Sony’s pride saw it loses tens of billions of dollars on their LCDs before they finally threw up their hands and gave up. Pretty expensive loss of face for a business which cannot forget its pioneering Trinitron cathode ray tube designs.

The value proposition saw me looking for a larger screen over the past few months, though it was not remotely sourced from dismay with the 42″ Vizio. Superb in every way it has never missed a beat. The only change I made was to add a pair of truly ancient (and truly excellent) B+W bookshelf speakers in lieu of the smallish ones built into the set. The latter are not bad as the TV’s design was before the current Jobsian obsession with all that is slim and trim in electronics, meaning that the internal speakers are actually a decent size with sound to match.

A friend counselled a local purchase owing to the ease of return if something went wrong, and pointed me to Costco as they double the standard warranty to 2 years and as with most things, TVs tend to fail when very young or very old. Amazon is not remotely competitive on price, selling the same set for 20% more. So I toddled off to the local Costco warehouse store to compare picture quality, having determined that 55″ – 72% more screen area than with a 42″ – was the most my viewing area could handle. Some dozen large screen sets were on display, all fed from the same high quality BluRay DVD source, making critical A-B comparisons easy. Matters were further helped by a knowledgeable salesman who candidly told me that return rates for LG, Samsung and Vizio are the same and that LED adds nothing to image quality, as I could see for myself.

Comparing the two very costly Samsungs with the two far cheaper Vizios I could tell no material difference absent the usual color mismatches which are easily cured through proper tuning. As the 42″ Vizio has proved as reliable as a brick, it came down to a $700 LCD model and an $800 LED model. LED sets are a relatively new development, replacing the backlit LCD panel with a myriad of light emitting diodes. All sets on display were 1080p, and the four I compared all sported 120Hz refresh rates, adequate to avoid motion blur on all but the fastest moving content. Given that the image quality on the two Vizios was identical, the only difference was one of weight – the LED being 5 lbs lighter, an irrelevancy – and thickness. Now why anyone should care whether their large screen TV is 6″ thick or 2″ thick beats me, so I went for the older $700 LCD model, whose bezel is also a tad wider. No biggie. The LED version uses $6 more power annually, something it would take over a decade to recover based on the $100 higher asking price.


The 42″ Vizio’s home screen driven by the HackMini running OS Lion 10.7.4.
DVDpedia allows one click access to movies stored on large capacity HDD boxes.

The Vizios also had one feature missing from the Samsungs – an old fashioned VGA socket for a PC. My TV uses three input sources – the cable company’s feed/DVR, an AppleTV and the HackMini for stored movies/BBC iPlayer/Netflix/Amazon VOD. The last uses a VGA cable and while it would be easy to adapt that to HDMI, it means one less thing to worry about, given the availability of the VGA socket.

Vizio’s web site says this model is discontinued and I would expect the price to drop further as inventory is remaindered. Note the inclusion of web apps for Hulu, Netflix, etc.

Free delivery is scheduled for next week at which time I have updated this piece with my first impressions. Whether a BluRay player makes sense remains to be seen. On the 42″ model I could not tell the difference between BR and standard DVDs. The speakers in the 55″ one appear to be smaller than those in the 42″, suggesting poorer sound quality, but I will again bypass these in favor of the external bookshelf speakers, driven by an old Sony amplifier.

Bottom line? 72% more screen area for 22% less cost in nominal dollars – call it 35% after inflation – and with 2.3 times the number of pixels per unit area (1920 x 1080 compared with 1280 x 720) speaks to the continuing spiralling down of selling prices over the past five years. So even though making a 100″ screen is more than twice as difficult as making a 50″ one, owing to higher rejection rates as size increases, I do rather think that a 100″ screen for under $5,000 in five years is a realistic expectation. Read on.

Bigger and bigger:

About the time I wrote the piece linked above, Pioneer released a 104″ plasma set at some $100,000 a pop. You see these in TV studios and corporate settings now and then, and the price has now come down to some $75,000. Not realistic for home use at that price. Further, plasma screens use far more power and sport a glossy glass front, just like the ghastly displays in iMacs. The last thing you want in a TV is a reflective surface.

However, looking at that same Costco site, you can now get something almost as large for a very affordable price with a matte LCD panel:

While that’s a lot of money, it argues strongly as a preferred alternative to the projector/screen approach. The latter is damned by the need for a darkened room, as projectors are not that bright, and involves extensive installation intricacies. I rather doubt that my landlady will take well to a chassis suspended from the ceiling along with holes for all the cables! Reckon on $4,000 for a quality projector and $5-6,000 when all is said and done. A high quality screen will run you some $1,000, a retractable one even more. So that 90″ Sharp LCD is not only competitive, you can bet prices will fall. Further, you can view the Sharp comfortably in broad daylight.

All these devices are a wonderful way of displaying photographs as well as movies. Because the normal viewing distance for 42″ to 55″ displays is 7-11 feet or so, even a 2 megapixel original will look wonderful as the inclination to pixel peep a large TV screen is generally missing for all but the certifiably insane. I would not be surprised if my next TV, five years hence, was a $5,000 100″ LCD model, but first I will have to buy a house to accommodate it!

Calibration? Easy. I will simply use the EyeOne colorimeter via the HackMini to tune the colors just so.

That old 42″ Vizio? Still in perfect order, it was given to that same friend who so smartly pointed me to Costco, though I did have to pay the $55 annual ‘membership’ fee, a sunk cost for one who does not propose to buy his beef by the cow, which seems to be the most common package size for meat at the Costco warehouse. And as for Costco, clearly they are doing most things right:

4K TV panels:

4K panels are now coming to market, boasting 2160p definition, twice that of 1080p. They are still expensive and use upscaling to make use of that definition, which is comparable to Retina Displays on MacBook Pros. Whether this is a solution looking for a problem is unclear, but they may pose an affordable alternative to large computer displays for use with desktop OS X or Windows machines. Prices will only come down – Amazon lists a Seiki 50″ set for under $1,400.