Glass Bodies a variant-level encyclopedia of vintage lenses and cameras by iwillpat

Contax II

Zeiss Ikon · Contax RF mount · 24×36mm on 35mm film, removable back · 1936

Also known as: Zeiss Ikon Contax II · Contax 2 · コンタックスII

Variants & identification

Variant Mount Years Serial ranges Production
Contax II Contax RF 1936–1942 Z, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, J, K, L, M, N and O prefixes — the Zeiss Ikon letter blocks running 1935/36 to 1943, each a block of 99,999 numbers
C 10001–15000 (1936) and C 87001–90000 (1937) — the two dated segments published within the C block
F 41001–46000 (1937) and F 72401–77400 (1938) — the two dated segments published within the F block
ends at O 65500, in 1943 		No figure published
Military issue (Kriegsmarine and Wehrmacht marked) Contax RF 1939–1943 — No figure published
  1. Sources disagree over the last three letters. Camera-wiki gives M = 1940/42, N = 1941/43, O = 1943 and Q = 1943/44; Petrakla gives M = 1940/42 and N = 1942/3, and treats O as its own speculation from a camera it owned rather than a listed block; a third list gives M = 1940/41. Everything from Z to L is identical in all three.
  2. No total production figure for the Contax II was found in any source consulted, and the letter blocks cannot supply one: they were shared across every Zeiss Ikon camera, and not every number in a block was issued.
  3. No serial block has been published for the Navy-marked cameras, or for any other military contract. The markings are the evidence; the numbers are ordinary.
  4. Corroboration searched for and found. The camera's substantive claims are carried by three accounts written independently of each other: camera-wiki, Pacific Rim Camera's Contax II and III page, and Early Photography's catalogue entries, the last of which works from cameras in hand and cites the Zeiss Ikon General Catalogues of 1936 and 1937, the third and fourth editions of Contax Photography, Hans-Jürgen Kuc's On the Trail of the Contax, and British patent 419915/1934. Pacific Rim and camera-wiki independently give the single combined viewfinder-rangefinder window, the 1/1250 top speed against the Leica's 1/1000, the self-timer, and the removal of the tooling to Kyiv as reparations. The letter-block dating is already triangulated across three separate lists in the note above.
  5. The shutter's slow end, settled from Zeiss Ikon's own literature, and the source of the error that made it look contested. This entry carried "1s – 1/1250 and B, T", which is camera-wiki's figure. The manufacturer's US price lists say otherwise, in the same wording two years apart: Price List No. 15, effective 1 May 1939, describes both models as having a "metal-curtain focal plane shutter with speeds from 1/2 to 1/1250 second, removable back, built-in delayed-action release", and Price List No. 16, effective 1 October 1941, repeats it verbatim. An earlier Zeiss Ikon list, No. 14, heads its entry "CONTAX II Chrome Camera with speeds of 1/2 to 1/1250 sec." That is three of the maker's own documents against one wiki, and it confirms Early Photography, which gives "speeds 1/2 - 1/1250, B" from cameras in hand and adds that "1 second could be obtained by releasing the delayed action with the shutter set to B" — a trick, not a marked speed. Where camera-wiki's figure comes from is visible in the same archive: Zeiss Ikon's postwar Contax IIa brochure says "Exposures from one sec. to 1/1250 sec., also B and T", which is camera-wiki's Contax II specification exactly. The IIa's slow end and its T have been grafted onto the prewar camera.
  6. Two claims still rest on camera-wiki alone and were not confirmed anywhere else. Neither Pacific Rim Camera nor Early Photography names Hubert Nerwin as the designer, and neither publishes a rangefinder base length — the 90mm figure has no second source in anything consulted here. Treat the designer attribution and the base length as the weakest numbers on this page.
  7. Searched without result: no production total, no military serial block, and no independent figure for the rangefinder base were found on Pacific Rim Camera, Early Photography, the Kievaholic Klub or USSRPhoto. Camera-wiki refused connections when this check was run (2026-09-04), so its pages could not be re-read against the others.
How to tell them apart (expand)
  • ONE window for focusing and framing — the first camera in the world to do it
  • 90mm rangefinder base
  • A top shutter speed of 1/1250, against the Leica's 1/500
  • Shutter speeds on a dial concentric with the advance knob

Contax II:

  • Chrome finish; 610 g; 85.7 × 42.9 × 140 mm
  • Combined viewfinder and rangefinder in one window
  • Early bodies are marked 1/100 and 1/200 where later ones read 1/125 and 1/250 — Early Photography's only substantive running change to the shutter dial
  • Knurling on the film advance knob is vertical at first, square later (Early Photography)
  • No meter, and a short rewind knob: the Contax III's knob is taller and carries the meter's calculator

Military issue (Kriegsmarine and Wehrmacht marked):

  • A Reich eagle over M for Marine on the top cap — e.g. an M5 engraving
  • Otherwise a standard production body: the markings are the variant, not the camera

Serial-range notes

one letter and five digits
THE RULE. Zeiss Ikon numbered cameras with a letter followed by a five-digit number, moving to the next letter each time 99,999 was reached, and in 1936 — having exhausted the alphabet at Z — it started again at A. The letter dates the camera: Z = 1935/36, A = 1936, B = 1936, C = 1936/37, D = 1937, E = 1937, F = 1937/38, G = 1938, H = 1938, J = 1938/39, K = 1939, L = 1939, M = 1940/42, N = 1941/43, O = 1943, Q = 1943/44. The scheme is Zeiss Ikon's whole catalogue, not the Contax alone, so the blocks measure nothing about how many Contax IIs were built. The Contax II and the Contax III share the sequence, and a serial cannot tell them apart.
C 10001–15000, C 87001–90000, F 41001–46000, F 72401–77400
Four segments dated more finely than the letter allows: C 10001–15000 to 1936 and C 87001–90000 to 1937; F 41001–46000 to 1937 and F 72401–77400 to 1938. They matter because C and F are the two blocks the table splits across two years, and they show which half of the block a body sits in.
C89172
A dated example that tests the segments. Early Photography records a late Contax II with the 50cm Fernobjektiv reading C89172 — inside the published C 87001–90000 segment, so 1937 and not the 1936 half of the C block. The same camera carries a second number, W2199.
O 65500
The end of the line. Production of the Contax II is recorded as finishing at O 65500 in 1943, a year after the 1942 date carried in this entry and in most accounts, which put the end of production at the bombing of the Dresden works.
G14580
The Imperial War Museum's Kriegsmarine outfit body, cited elsewhere in this entry, falls in the G block: 1938. The Navy-marked cameras were ordinary production bodies numbered in the ordinary sequence, and no separate block was set aside for them.
an extra letter
A second letter, before or after the block letter, means the camera went back to the factory for repair or modification. It is commonest on the Contax I but occurs on the II as well, and it is not a date.
where to look
Early Photography notes that the camera number was moved to the accessory shoe during the Contax II's run, so early and late bodies do not carry it in the same place. On the postwar Jena-built cameras matching numbers are also stamped inside the film door and under the film gate, and the same practice is reported for the prewar bodies.
the number on the lens
A separate sequence. Carl Zeiss numbered lenses in one continuous run across every type, dated from the company-wide lens table — 1936 = 1674882–1942806, 1937 = 1930150–2219775, 1938 = 2267991–2527984, and so on. Early Photography's 1936 body B21882 came with a 5cm Sonnar numbered 1863717 and an 8.5cm Triotar numbered 2140934, a 1937 number. Body and lens numbers are unrelated and are not expected to agree.

Specifications

Format
24×36mm on 35mm film, removable back
Finder
Combined viewfinder and coupled rangefinder in a single window
Base length
90 mm
Shutter
vertical-travel metal slat, curtains connected by cloth straps · 1/2 – 1/1250 and B, on Zeiss Ikon's own price lists. A full second can be had by releasing the delayed action with the shutter set to B. There is no T
Designed by
Hubert Nerwin — chief designer
Weight
610 g
Dimensions
140 × 85.7 × 42.9 mm
Country
Germany
Original price
£50 10s 0d in Britain with the 5cm f/2 Sonnar, while the Contax I stayed on sale at £41 (Early Photography)

Where sources disagree

End of Kiev production
  • 1987 — the figure this entry carried, giving the design a fifty-one-year run
  • "at least until the late 1980's" — Pacific Rim Camera
  • "All the way up until 1984 or so" — the Kievaholic Klub

Better supported: none: no source consulted cites a factory record, and all three are collector estimates

The Kiev rangefinders ran on the Contax tooling long enough that the exact last year matters to the design's total lifespan and to nothing else. Pacific Rim's hedge and the Kievaholic Klub's differ by three or four years; neither gives a document. Half a century is the claim the evidence supports.

What reviewers say

History

The Contax II is where the rangefinder camera arrives at its modern form. Before it, every camera with a coupled rangefinder made you do two things in two places: align the image in one window, then move your eye to another to frame. The Contax II put both in one window, in 1936. Leitz did not manage the same until the M3 of 1954, eighteen years later, and every rangefinder built since — Canon’s, Nikon’s, Leitz’s own — is working from this camera’s premise.

The rest of the specification was no less pointed. A 90mm rangefinder base, more than twice the Leica III’s, which is why a Contax focuses a fast lens more precisely. A vertical metal shutter reaching 1/1250 when the fastest Leitz offered was 1/1000 — and, at the other end, stopping at a marked half second, with the full second available only by tripping the delayed action on B. A removable back. And the Sonnar lenses in front of it, which many photographers still regard as the finest of the era.

What separates it from the Contax I is not the ideas but the execution. Zeiss Ikon put Hubert Nerwin in charge of a focused redesign, and the notorious unreliability of the shutter went away. The camera was used by photojournalists throughout the 1940s and 1950s, and derivatives of it were still being manufactured in the late 1980s.

That last fact is the strangest part of its history. When the Soviet Union took the Zeiss Ikon tooling from Dresden as reparations in 1945 and set it up in Kyiv, what it took was this camera. The Kiev rangefinders are Contax IIs and IIIs, built on the original machinery — the Kievaholic Klub reports early Kievs on whose inner surfaces the pressed-out word “Contax” is still legible in mirror image, with “Kiev” engraved over it in Cyrillic. Nobody has produced a factory record of the last year: Pacific Rim Camera says the line ran “at least until the late 1980’s”, the Kievaholic Klub says “up until 1984 or so”, and this entry has carried 1987. On any of those figures the Contax II’s design stayed in production for about half a century.

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This history is AI-written, from the sources listed at the foot of the page. Where the record is silent it says so rather than filling the gap — but no human wrote these sentences.

Photographs

Contax II
Contax II, 1938 — Windjammer1986, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Contax II
Contax II — Stefan Bucher from Zürich, Switzerland, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Live listings

Asking price, USD: a median of $300 across 20 fixed-price listings on 2026-09-11 (middle half $160–$450). Tracked since 2026-09-06, 4 days: unchanged from $300.

By day
DateMedianMiddle halfListings
2026-09-11$300$160–$45020
2026-09-09$300$160–$45020
2026-09-08$300$160–$45021
2026-09-06$300$99–$40022

Asking prices from the listings scanned, not sales; junk-flagged rows and auction lots excluded; other currencies are not converted.

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Listings updated 2026-09-11. Links go to the shop or marketplace that carries the item.

Related: Contax I · Contax IIa · Contax III · Jena Contax · Kiev 4M · Kiev 5 · Kiev II

Lenses for this body: Biogon 3.5cm f/2.8 · Biotar 4cm f/2 · Biotar 7.5cm f/1.5 · Sonnar 13.5cm f/4 · Sonnar 5cm f/1.5 · Sonnar 5cm f/2 · Sonnar 8.5cm f/2 · Tessar 2.8cm f/8 · Tessar 5cm f/3.5 · Triotar 8.5cm f/4

Sources (13)

Every page here is assembled from public sources, and the gaps are real ones. If you own this camera, know a serial number I'm missing, or can see where I have it wrong, tell me — corrections, serials and sample photos are all worth having.