{"id":15960,"date":"2015-07-26T13:13:01","date_gmt":"2015-07-26T20:13:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wkoopmans.ca\/notebook\/?p=15960"},"modified":"2015-07-26T13:13:01","modified_gmt":"2015-07-26T20:13:01","slug":"contax-g1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wkoopmans.ca\/notebook\/?p=15960","title":{"rendered":"Contax G1"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"ContaxG1-6412\"<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>
\nI was kindly lent a Contax G1 and three lenses and took the opportunity to shoot four rolls of film with it.\u00a0 The first thing you notice on picking it up is that it is an absolute gem.\u00a0 The level of finish is exceptional it feels like it was milled out of a solid block of titanium.\u00a0 It does have a nice rubberized grip but is a little too heavy to easily use one-handed.\u00a0The autofocus works well as long as you ensure that you set the center focus point on the subject.\u00a0 That’s fine for individual portraits but it caught me out a couple of times when it focused between two people despite my efforts.\u00a0 Additionally the focus is the loudest aspect of the camera drowning out the shutter and film advance although not really achieving objectionable levels.\u00a0 It’s too bad because even using manual focus doesn’t mitigate the noise as it works by ‘fly by wire’ and focuses to the distance you set on the top dial.\u00a0 Strangely when you change to manual focus rather than providing you an indication of the actual distance in the viewfinder as it does with autofocus it just gives an uncalibrated indication of whether you are setting focus in front or behind what the autofocus has determined.\u00a0 That and the fact that the manual focus dial is\u00a0 easily knocked inadvertently I would suggest that leaving it\u00a0in AF mode is the order of the day.\u00a0 Moving on to the viewfinder there is good news and bad news.\u00a0 The good news is that it adjusts it’s field of view depending on the lens that is mounted.\u00a0 To achieve this though it would seem that it was necessary to engineer it much like the viewfinder you would see on a zoom point and shoot and the result is that it is a small viewfinder that is sometimes hard to bring quickly to the eye, \u00a0like is possible with a fixed lens rangefinder, that’s the bad.\u00a0 Additionally on the good side of things the viewfinder automatically changes its masking to adjust for parallax and focus.<\/p>\n

Okay that’s all well and good, it’s a beautiful piece of camera engineering but what about the lenses?\u00a0 Well if the camera is a gem the lenses are diamonds.\u00a0 The standard lens the Zeiss T* Planar 2\/45 is perfectly matched and exquisitely built.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 With the camera I was also lent the 28mm f2 Biogon and 90mm f2 Sonnar two lenses equally as beautiful. The legendary Zeiss T* coating is evident on all the lenses.\u00a0 In the center of the lens barrel is the aperture ring with a\u00a0nice solid detent for each setting.\u00a0 Because the manual focus is done at the body there are no other external moving parts to the lens.\u00a0 The lenses are as good optically as they are aesthetically pleasing. The rendering of out of focus areas (bokeh) is terrific giving the images a strong three dimensionality. Unfortunately the limited number of aperture blades shows in the background highlights as hexagonal shapes rather than nicely rounded as is possible with more or curved blades. All three lenses have exceptional sharpness from corner to corner they may very well be the best film camera lenses I’ve ever used.<\/p>\n

A few other features of the camera are its top shutter speed of 1\/2000 of a second it has +-2 EV exposure compensation and will do three frame bracketing.\u00a0 You do have to be careful if you override the DX reading system to set a manual ISO as it does not revert back, it can be very easy to accidentally leave it at an incorrect setting (Something to remember)\u00a0 Also it’s not impossible to forget to remove the lens cap although you will get a very wrong exposure as the metering is\u00a0 TTL which is another amazing piece of engineering.\u00a0 It actually uses the light reflected off the shutter curtain to determine exposure.
\nOne thing about one camera:<\/strong><\/em> It was the first ever autofocus rangefinder camera<\/p>\n

Here are some of my first sample images there are more to come after I develop more film<\/p>\n\n\t\t