Christopher J Osborne

In the 1950s and 60s 35mm SLRs with in-lens leaf-shutters were a very popular class of cameras amongst advanced amateur photographers. The offered the considerable advantage of much lower manufacturing costs compared to the still fairly new focal plane shutter technology which was largely confined to very expensive professional SLRs. The disadvantage was that it was very difficult to design interchangeable lenses with in-lens leaf shutters, so most cameras in this class had wither fixed lenses, or had partially fixed lenses where only the first element was interchangeable. Lenses of this type were generally limited to a focal length range of approximately 35-100mm.

This class of camera was particularly popular amongst German camera companies, which still dominated the photography industry at this time. The Zeiss Ikon was the first company to produce cameras in this class with the Zeiss Ikon Contaflex launched in 1953. The other big players in this class were Voigtlander with their Bessamatic line of cameras, and the West German arm of Kodak with their Retina line of SLRs. The Zeiss Ikon Contaflex range ran along side their Contarex line of extremely expensive professional focal plane shutter SLRs.

The model you see here is the Contaflex Super was launched in 1959. At launch this was at the top of the Contaflex line, and had partially interchangeable lenses from 35mm to 115mm and a coupled selenium cell light meter with swinging needle indicators both in the viewfinder and on the top plate. (This kind of system was often referred to at the time as automatic exposure, though we certainly would call it such today!) This made the camera very convenient to operate by the standards of the time, although, like most leaf-shutter SLRs, the mirror was not of the instant return type, so the viewfinder was blacked out until the film was wound on. There was also an 8x30 monocular with an adapter allowing it to be attached to the front of the 50mm f/2.8 standard lens to provide the equivilent of a 400mm f/14 lens

Another lens option was a very early macro lens (illustrated below) which allowed a life-size 1:1 reproduction ratio. But the problem was that this although this lens allowed you to focus close enough for the 1:1 reproduction ratio it's very limited focusing range didn't let you focus at very much less tham a 1:1 reproduction ratio either! As modern photographers we should be very grateful for the convenience of macro lenses that focus all the way from 1:1 to infinity!

Links

• Zeiss Ikon Contaflex page on Wikipedia
• Zeiss Ikon Contaflex Super instruction manual on butkus.org