Category: Camera/Lens Repair

Contax 139 Quartz

12/9/2014

When I got it, the light seals were bad, and the leatherette was peeling (which is par for the course for these.) I got replacement kits for both and spent a couple hours refurbishing this beauty to the condition you see here. Soon I'll be running some film through it and posting the results!

And here's a shot of it before the new leatherette.

I've been looking forward to making this post for some time now. Contax is a Zeiss brand of lens infamy, but in the 70's they licensed the name to Yashica to make a line of SLR's that are just a cut above the standards. The mechanics are smooth and the design is elegant.

Here are a few pictures with with another favorite of Japanese manufacturing - the Yamaha DG-80 guitar amplifier.

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Canon FD 200mm f/2.8

10/24/2014

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... and as a follow up to yesterday's victory, I was able to successfully de-fungus this lens as well. There was significant wear on this guy so I suspect it was a favorite, but after a good cleaning, I was able to put it back together and take it for a test drive. Like the 300mm it has very nice bokeh and is capable of very sharp pictures, although it does show quite a bit of Chromatic Aberration at f/2.8, which you can remedy by stopping down to f/4.0 or with the CA removal tool in Lightroom.

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Canon FD 300mm f/4.0 S.S.C.

10/23/2014

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I got this lens from a kind soul that's been selling off part of his camera collection on Craigslist. I've bought several items from him and on my last trip he gave me two lenses for free because they had quite a bit of fungus inside. I was trepidatious at first about taking these lenses apart since they were pretty high end units in their day, but curiosity won out and I dug into the bigger 300mm first.

It was touch and go for a while since there are no manuals that I could find on the Internet, but I figured it out eventually. The fungus cleaned off very easily and I'm really liking the results this lens is producing. Now on to the 200mm f/2.8 that still needs cleaning!

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Contax 139 Quartz

Canon FD 200mm f/2.8

Canon FD 300mm f/4.0 S.S.C.

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