in the brief window between the Contax 645’s discontinuation and its elevation to the status of cult medium format film camera that it enjoys today. Thankfully, I bought my 645 body and half a dozen Zeiss lenses at a time when they were still relatively cheap: i.e. However, when I belatedly learned that the Contax 645 had been discontinued, I realized that the time had come to purchase one of my own. This means that over the years, I’ve handled rather a lot of them. Instead, due to the frequency with which I traveled on assignment, I preferred to rent one at my destination each time I needed to shoot. While I quickly came to rely upon the Contax 645 as central to my way of working, initially, I didn’t possess a Contax of my own. Indeed, if I were ever forced to choose only one camera to work with, I’m in no doubt as to which it would be. What Do I Know About the Contax 645?Īlthough I’ve occasionally branched out into using other makes, models, and formats of cameras over the years, I’ve been using the Contax 645 since it was still a new product, and it remains my default camera today. Yet despite the Contax 645 having become something of a cult camera, there’s little in the way of information available online from people with anything but the most superficial experience working with it, a situation I hope to redress in this review by covering the camera’s design, features, and handling from the point of view of a photographer who has used the camera professionally for almost two decades. And while the smaller negative size of 6x4.5 cm might appear to put the Contax at a disadvantage when compared with the aforementioned 6x7 models, I would argue that it comes with a range of features that more than make up for this minor shortcoming. As a result, it now commands correspondingly high prices on the used market.
Indeed, it comes with most of the features you would expect to see on a modern camera - albeit in a slightly less evolved form.Īlongside the Mamiya 7ii and the Pentax 67, the Contax 645 has gained a reputation as one of the best medium format cameras ever made. Produced during the twilight of the film era, the Contax’s design is far removed from that of earlier medium format SLRs. It’s a camera that will largely appeal to analog photographers looking to benefit from the greater resolution of 120 film, while still retaining many of the advantages of a 35mm SLR in terms of speed and mobility.
The Contax 645 AF is a relatively small and lightweight medium format film camera dating from the late 1990s.
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