Contax G2
Contax G2: the autofocus rangefinder that shouldn't really have existed
The Contax G2 occupies an odd little corner of 35mm history – a camera that arrived just as film was about to be quietly elbowed aside by digital, and which seemed determined to cram every clever idea that had ever occurred to a rangefinder engineer into one champagne‑coloured titanium shell. Launched by Kyocera in 1996 as the successor to the somewhat fragile, somewhat slow Contax G1 of 1994, the G2 was a serious attempt to do something nobody else had really managed: an autofocus, interchangeable‑lens 35mm rangefinder with proper Zeiss glass, aimed straight at well‑heeled travellers and the rather small but extremely vocal corner of the market that the Leica M6 considered its own.
Looking at it now, with the lovely little 21mm Biogon mounted up and the matching GF‑21 finder perched on top, it is hard not to be charmed all over again. There is something almost suspiciously well‑resolved about the design – the way the lens sits flush into the body, the way the matching finder rises out of the hot shoe like a tiny periscope, the way every accessory shares the same satin‑titanium finish. The G system was clearly drawn up as a single object on a single drawing board, rather than a body that lenses were grafted onto afterwards, and half a century’s worth of Zeiss nomenclature on the front of the lens gives the whole thing an air of unearned gravitas, like a small piece of optical bench equipment that somehow learned to take pictures.
A short, slightly awkward history
To understand the G2, it helps to go back a couple of years. Contax in this era was no longer a German company in any meaningful sense; the Contax name had been licensed by Kyocera (parent of Yashica) since the early 1970s, and the SLR side of the business – the much‑loved RTS, 139, 159, 167, RX and so on – had been built around manual‑focus Carl Zeiss lenses in the Contax/Yashica mount. By the early 1990s, AF SLRs from Canon and Nikon were eating that market alive, and Kyocera’s attempt at an AF SLR – the slightly cursed Contax AX, with its sensor that physically moved the entire film plane back and forth to focus the lens – was clever but expensive and slow. They needed something else.
The G1, released in 1994, was that something else. It paired a new bayonet mount with a clutch of brand‑new Zeiss lenses and an autofocus system based on an extended optical baseline – essentially the rangefinder principle, but with the camera doing the triangulation electronically and driving the lens by motor. The reaction was warm but not without reservations: the AF could be sluggish and prone to hunting in low light, the top shutter was “only” 1/2000s, and a couple of the later lenses (the 21mm and the 35mm f/2) didn’t actually work on early G1 bodies without a factory upgrade, marked by a small green sticker on the back. (Alex Luyckx, Vish Vish)
The G2, arriving in 1996, was the version Contax probably wished they had shipped first. The chassis was redesigned with a slightly chunkier grip, dual control dials in the Zeiss Ikon idiom, and a substantially overhauled autofocus module. Out went the single passive AF system; in came a hybrid arrangement: a passive phase‑detection system using two windows up top, plus a near‑infrared active beam projected from the camera that could bounce off close subjects in the dark and give the camera something to latch onto. The motor drive jumped to 4 frames per second, the top shutter speed rose to 1/6000s, flash sync went up to a quoted 1/200s (1/180 by the factory service manual, if you’re feeling pedantic), and an external command dial appeared on the front in the position of the old Zeiss Ikon Contax‑II focusing wheel – a quiet but very deliberate piece of brand archaeology.
Production ran from 1996 until Kyocera officially exited the camera business in 2005. For most of that run, the G2 was sold in the “champagne” titanium finish you see here, which Contax variously called Titanium, Coin or Moonglow in their literature. A black version followed in 1998 in both painted and properly chrome‑plated flavours, and is now substantially more expensive on the used market for no very good reason beyond rarity.
The body: titanium, two AF systems and a viewfinder that does conjuring tricks
Pick up a G2 cold and a couple of things hit you immediately. The first is that it is heavier than it looks – 560g for the body alone, with titanium top, bottom and back panels over a substantial internal chassis. The second is the surface finish, which is matte and slightly grainy rather than polished, and which weathers beautifully: a well‑used G2 acquires the same sort of dignified patina as a good titanium watch case, rather than the brassy wear pattern of a painted Leica.
The whole top plate is a study in dense packaging. Reading from left to right above the lens, you have:
The frame rate/self-timer/multiple exposure control and ISO override button on the far left
The combined AF/MF dial and rear AF button on the back right of the top plate
The shutter‑speed dial and exposure‑compensation dial, on the top right
The shutter release, with a sliding collar that doubles as the on switch and an AE‑lock detent – push it forward once for on, again for AE‑L, which is one of those small details G2 owners get quietly evangelical about
The two AF windows on the front edge of the top plate, one passive optical pair and one for the active infrared system
The main viewfinder window at the rear, and the hot shoe in the centre
The viewfinder itself is one of the cleverest pieces of the whole design. It is a real‑image finder with variable magnification, motor‑driven to zoom automatically between 28mm and 90mm as you change lenses. It even tracks the focal length of the 35–70mm Vario‑Sonnar zoom (the G2‑only lens that arrived in 1999 and was, incidentally, the first zoom lens ever made for a rangefinder camera). Parallax is corrected dynamically: rather than drawing bright‑lines that slide around the frame the way an M Leica does, the G2 actually masks out the unused area in black, so what you compose against is exactly what ends up on the film. Below the frame, a small digital display shows shutter speed, focus distance in metres, and an AF confirmation arrow.
The autofocus is the bit that divides opinion. In good light, with a contrasty subject, the G2’s passive system locks on quickly and quietly to whatever sits in the small central focus zone. Move into the dark, or onto something low-contrast like a blank wall, and the near-infrared-active system steps in and pulses an invisible beam at the subject – effective out to a few metres, but useless for landscapes. There is a dedicated rear AF button for back‑button focusing, plus continuous AF for tracking subjects (which, as Vish Vish gently observes, is “generally rubbish in any camera before about 2016, let alone in a 1996 camera”). Manual focus is handled by a thumbwheel on the front, with the distance read off the viewfinder display rather than by any actual mechanical rangefinder coupling. There is no patch to align, which purists either love or loathe depending on temperament.
Other nerdy details worth knowing:
Shutter is an electronically timed vertical‑travel focal‑plane unit, with metal blades, with a quoted transit time of 4.1ms – very quick for the period and the reason flash sync gets all the way to 1/200s.
Metering is TTL through the lens, centre‑weighted, EV1–19 at ISO 100, with a calibration K of 1.3 (Zeiss’s house standard rather than the more common 1.16, which means G2 negatives tend to come back ever so slightly denser than other cameras would have given you).
Power comes from two CR2 lithiums, with a quoted life of around 80 rolls of 24‑exposure film per pair, which sounds optimistic until you remember that the camera spends almost all of its time switched off between frames.
Flange focal distance is specified as 28.95mm ± 0.02mm – worth noting because that tight tolerance is what makes the G2 a slightly tricky donor body for the mirrorless adaptor community, and why “stiff” or worn G‑mount adaptors can knock infinity focus on a Sony or Fuji.
The Biogon 21mm f/2.8 T*
The lens on the front of this particular body is the one that, more than any other, makes G‑system owners insufferable at parties. The Carl Zeiss Biogon T* 2,8/21 G is a properly serious wide‑angle, and to appreciate why, you have to dig back rather a long way into Zeiss’s own history.
The Biogon name first appeared in 1936, on a 2.8/35mm lens designed by Ludwig Bertele for the original screw‑mount Contax rangefinder. Bertele kept thinking about the problem after the war, and in 1951 produced an entirely new Biogon based on ideas from a 1946 patent by the Russian designer Mikhail Roosinov: a near‑symmetrical wide‑angle layout that put strong negative menisci at the front and back of the lens, sandwiching a pair of positive groups around the aperture. The advantage of this “sandwich” arrangement is that the principal planes can sit physically very close to the film, giving you a wide-angle view with almost none of the geometric distortion that a retrofocus SLR design – Zeiss’s own Distagon, for example – inevitably introduces. The disadvantage is that the rear element ends up only millimetres from the film, which is why you can’t fit a true Biogon to an SLR: the mirror has nowhere to go. (Zeiss’s own history)
The G‑mount Biogon 2,8/21 is the modern descendant of that 1951 design, and it really commits to the philosophy. Its back focal length – the distance between the rearmost glass and the film – is just 12mm, which is one of the reasons it took an entirely new camera mount to make it work; the later Biogon 2,8/21 ZM for Leica M cameras had to be redesigned with a back focal length of 15mm to clear an M body’s rangefinder coupling. That small change is the reason the ZM version has visibly more distortion than the G version that came before it. (Ken Rockwell on the ZM Biogon) The G‑mount lens, in other words, is the geometrically purer of the two, which is the sort of fact you can deploy at a camera fair if you want to clear a small patch of space around yourself.
In the metal, it is a tiny thing. 55mm filter thread, nine elements in seven groups (essentially the same prescription as the ZM, but compressed), with the rear group sitting right up against the shutter curtain. Aperture range is f/2.8 to f/22, autofocus is by wire from the camera body, and the close focus is 0.5m. The “T*” designation refers to Zeiss’s multilayer coating, which by this period had become rather better than the merely good coatings of the 1970s, and the lens is famously well behaved against flare for something this wide. Performance is the usual story for a Biogon: stupidly sharp from f/2.8 across the whole frame, essentially zero rectilinear distortion, and a small amount of vignetting at full aperture that is mostly the inevitable cos⁴ falloff that comes free with any genuinely symmetrical wide angle. (Ken Rockwell on the G system)
Because the rear element sits so close to the film, the lens has a couple of consequences that gear‑heads will recognise. It is exceptionally compact – the entire optical block disappears into the camera body almost up to the front group. And, as Zeiss themselves note in that PDF, the steep angle at which the marginal rays strike the film means it is rather hostile to digital sensors; adaptors exist for Sony and Fuji bodies, but corner colour shifts and smearing are the usual reward, and the lens really wants to be shot on the film it was designed for.
The little hat: the GF‑21 finder
Mount the 21mm on a G2, and the camera’s built‑in zooming finder politely declines to help – its range stops at 28mm. So Contax supplied a dedicated optical finder for the 21mm (and a separate one for the 16mm Hologon, which is a different story entirely), in a matching titanium finish, with a small foot that slides into the hot shoe.
The finder you see on top of this camera is the GF‑21, an all‑optical bright‑line frame that gives you a clean view of the 21mm’s field of view (around 90° diagonal). It is fixed focus, with no rangefinder coupling – you compose through the finder, focus with the camera’s AF on whatever sits in the centre of the main viewfinder, and trust that everything will be in the frame. The clever bit is that the finder’s framing is calibrated for the 21mm’s actual coverage on the G2’s film gate, including a sensible allowance for parallax at moderate distances. The less clever bit is that it has no spirit level, no diopter adjustment and a small but distinct amount of barrel distortion of its own, which doesn’t affect the picture you take but does make tall buildings look slightly less vertical than they are – Ken Rockwell, drily, points out that the Zeiss 21mm has no visible distortion “although the separate finder sure does.”
It is, in other words, an old‑fashioned accessory finder of the sort that Leica owners have been peering through since the 1930s, and there is a certain pleasure to that. There is also an honest workflow to it: you frame in the small finder, then drop your eye to the main finder for focus confirmation and exposure information, then back up for the shot. After half a roll, it becomes second nature, which is more than can be said for some modern interfaces.
What it’s like to use, thirty years on
For all its complexity, the G2 is a quietly satisfying camera in the hand. It is a small computer in a beautiful suit, doing a great deal of work on your behalf and largely succeeding. Load a fresh roll into the back, close it, and the motor purrs a single short purr as it auto‑advances to frame one and reads the DX code off the cassette. Frame, half‑press, focus, shoot, and the next frame is already waiting for you, with a soft whirr that is one of the great identifiable sounds of late‑film‑era engineering.
Wide open at f/2.8, the 21mm gives you images with that particular Biogon look – very high micro‑contrast, vanishingly little distortion, deep depth of field by virtue of focal length – and the G2’s metering is consistently a bit on the generous side, which is exactly what you want for negative film. At f/8 and f/11 on a good evening, with the matching little finder perched up top and the strap settling into the kind of soft leather worn‑in only film bags seem to produce, you have what is probably one of the most enjoyable travel cameras ever made.
It is not, in fairness, without quirks. The AF can still hunt against a featureless sky. The manual‑focus implementation is genuinely awkward and is best thought of as a get‑you‑home spare. CR2 batteries are no longer in every corner shop. And the electronics are very much electronics: a dead capacitor or a failed AF sensor on a G2 means a trip to one of an ever‑shrinking number of competent specialists, rather than a screwdriver and a quiet afternoon. A G2 is rather like a piece of high‑end hi‑fi from the same period – built superbly, but built with assumptions about parts availability that the wider world has since stopped honouring.
Set all that against the experience of actually using one with a Biogon on the front, however, and it’s easy to forgive. Kyocera, the company that owned the Contax brand at the time, eventually mismanaged the business into the ground and announced the end of Contax cameras in 2005, but they did at least leave behind a small range of products that genuinely deserved the badge on the front. Three‑quarters of a century on from Bertele’s 1951 Biogon, and thirty years on from this body’s own debut, this little champagne brick with its tiny optical hat is still capable of producing some of the best 21mm pictures you’ll ever take – and looking quietly smug about it on the shelf in between rolls.
