Want to talk about the camera equivalent of a lead off homerun?  Then get ahold of the Contax T. This camera was introduced in 1984 to kick off the Contax T family of compact 35mm film cameras. It was built by Kyocera to be sold under the Contax brand name, it had an excellent lens made by Yashica in conjunction with Carl Zeiss, and it had an exterior design modeled by Porsche. The camera has a rugged metal body with a titanium advance lever, and a synthetic ruby shutter button. The shutter is a quartz-timed, stepless electronic leaf shutter. A bright, clear viewfinder/rangefinder makes composition and focusing a cinch. Oh, and when you are all done with it, the lens folds up behind a metal door drawbridge-style.  The Contax T really is something else.

Contax T cameras are not terribly common these days.  Heck, they weren't terribly common in the mid 80s when they were introduced.  They were very much a luxury, high-end compact camera.  So in acquainting you with the Contax T it might help to explain it as a combination between the Olympus XA and the Minox 35. In form, it looks a lot like the Minox 35 with the folding drawbridge design that hides the lens when not in use and folds down extending the lens for use. But unlike the Minox 35, which was a lightweight, more plastic camera that lacked a rangefinder for critical focusing, the Contax T is metal bodied and has a rangefinder, making it similar to the Olympus XA in terms of super compact 35mm cameras with rangefinder focusing capability.  Like the XA, the Contax T also operates in Aperture Priority exposure mode, where the user manually chooses the aperture and the camera times out the appropriate shutter speed for correct exposure.  A display in the viewfinder lights up a LED next to the approximate shutter speed being used.  I say approximate because the viewfinder display only shows four shutter speeds but the Contax T was capable of stepless shutter speed selection between 1/500 to 8 seconds.  

Also like the XA, the Contax T accepted an accessory flash that attached to the left side of the camera. This T14 Auto flash has enough power for 30 feet at ISO 100 and a 7 second cycling time with standard AA batteries.  So it is not going to knock your socks off with its capabilities, but it will get the job done.  The camera is a bit big and awkward with the flash attached, but better an awkward camera than horribly underexposed images.

With the elegant Porsche design and the hefty, solid feel of this camera it is easy to overlook the fine Carl Zeiss 38mm f2.8 Sonnar lens at its heart. By all accounts, this is a great lens (and pretty similar to the lens used on the succeeding Contax T2). As one can expect from a lens carrying the Carl Zeiss name, the images produced by the Contax T are sharp, crisp, and don't suffer much at the edge to either falloff or softness even at f2.8. The lens is a five element Sonnar design with a minimum focusing distance of 1 meter (3.3 feet). This can feel a bit too far away with the 38mm focal length but it is not too bad either. Of course a max f2.8 aperture is always welcome on such a camera and does help the Contax T be pretty versatile even without the flash attached.

The Contax T really feels like a camera built to make a splash upon its introduction.  It was Kyocera's first camera under license from Zeiss and by all appearances, they swung for the fences on this one... and connected.  It goes without saying that pretty much any of the Contax cameras, or anything with the words Carl Zeiss on it, are safe bets if you want a quality camera. But that would gloss over all the fine ways in which the Contax T truly is quite impressive.