The Contax T2 Put a Zeiss Lens in a Titanium Pocket

In 1990, by most accounts, Kyocera put a small autofocus film camera on sale in Japan under its Contax name. It had a titanium body, a Carl Zeiss lens that slid out when you switched it on, and a price to match. Brooklyn Film Camera's guide notes it was never inexpensive, even when new. It was the Contax T2.

The date is slightly soft. Dusty Grain's review and a 2026 buyer's guide from Brooklyn Film Camera both give 1990, while Wikipedia's Contax T entry and camera-wiki.org give 1991. What is not in doubt is what the camera became. It started as a premium pocket camera and ended up, three decades later, as one of the most sought-after film cameras on the secondhand market.

The camera before it

By the 1980s the Contax cameras came out of a partnership between Yashica, which Kyocera owned, and Carl Zeiss. In 1984 the partners produced the first Contax T, a 35mm rangefinder with a titanium body and a Carl Zeiss Sonnar 38mm f/2.8 lens with Zeiss T-star coating. It was focused by hand, and its flash, the A14, clipped onto the side as a separate unit.

The T was a beautiful, fiddly object. The T2 kept the lens design and the titanium, and dropped almost everything that made the first camera slow to use.

What the T2 did

The T2's lens was the same 38mm Sonnar formula, five elements in four groups, but it retracted into the body and focused itself with an active autofocus system. You could still set the distance by hand if you wanted to. A flash was built in. The shutter topped out at 1/500 of a second, which is modest by later standards and more than enough for a pocket camera loaded with ordinary film.

Here is the spec sheet as camera-wiki.org records it.

Film without a DX code defaults to ISO 100. In aperture priority mode the camera runs slower exposures on its own, with an automatic bulb setting beyond one second, and with the flash it syncs anywhere from 1/30 to 1/500. Brooklyn Film Camera describes the titanium body as dense and cool in the hand, at around 10.5 ounces.

The finishes are part of the appeal. Wikipedia lists the T2 in silver titanium, black and a gold-plated version. Collectors also talk about a champagne finish, and Lapse of the Shutter notes that the black titanium cameras can cost even more than the standard ones.

The family and the end

The T2 sat at the center of a small line of premium compacts. The T3 that followed was smaller still, with a recomputed six-element 35mm Sonnar, passive autofocus and a top shutter speed of 1/1200. The T-VS models added Vario-Sonnar zoom lenses. In 1997 the Tix brought the formula to APS film with a 28mm lens, and in 2002 the TVS Digital tried the idea with a five-megapixel sensor.

None of it saved the brand. In 2005 Kyocera announced that it would stop making Contax cameras at the end of that year, and the T2 went from a current product to a used one for good.

The second life

For a while that was the end of the story. Brooklyn Film Camera's guide says a clean T2 cost four or five hundred dollars about fifteen years ago. By the early 2020s prices had passed a thousand, and a serviced example now regularly sells for around two thousand dollars. Not every source is that high. Dusty Grain puts typical prices near $1,100 and Lapse of the Shutter cites about $1,200 for a mint champagne camera, so condition, finish and the date of the review all matter.

The reasons for the climb are the usual ones for a film camera. Film photography came back, the supply of good cameras only shrinks, and, as several reviews note, a handful of visible celebrity owners pushed the T2 in front of people who had never shot film.

Buying one now

A T2 is an electronic camera more than thirty years old, and that is the main thing to understand before paying for one. Brooklyn Film Camera lists the common faults as autofocus that hunts in low light or at close range, light leaks around the film door, sticky aperture blades and broken flex cables, and aging light seals. A full clean, lubricate and adjust can run $400 to $500, if you can find someone willing to do it. Dusty Grain adds that technicians often refuse to repair a T2 that has been dropped, and lists a few habits worth learning. The autofocus can struggle with faces at about a meter, so prefocus. Large fingers can stray in front of the lens. Cold weather can stop the camera, which the review puts down to the battery, so keep a spare warm in a pocket.

So buy from a seller who has tested the camera with film, ask for scans from the last roll, and treat a cheap untested T2 as a gamble rather than a bargain. If the price makes you wince, a capable 1990s compact from another maker will teach you most of the same habits.

The T2 belongs with the other cameras that made film feel like a choice again. Read about the Leica M6 revival, the pocket digital descendant in our Ricoh GR street photography story, and the retro-styled Fujifilm X100. For instant film, see the Polaroid SX-70. More in cameras and the tech section.

Kyocera built the T2 to be the best camera a person could carry without thinking about it. The irony is that people now think about it a great deal, mostly when they see the price.