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

Contax IIa

Zeiss Ikon · Contax RF mount · 24×36mm on 35mm film, removable back · 1950

our own finding

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

Variants & identification

Variant Mount Years Serial ranges Production
Black dial Contax RF 1950–1954 P 97001–100000 — 11/1949 to 06/1950
S 20001–28000 — 07/1950 to 04/1951
T 5001–9000 — 03/1951 to 07/1951
T 28001–35000 — 08/1951 to 12/1951
U 1–5000 — 01/1952 to 05/1952
V 15001–20000 — 07/1952 to 08/1952
X 1–3000 — 09/1952 to 10/1952
Y 57001–62001 — 11/1952 to 03/1953
A 43001–46001 — 04/1953 to 10/1953 		No figure published
Colour dial Contax RF 1954–1961 A 46000–53000 — 11/1953 to 09/1954
B 90000–95000 — 10/1954 to 02/1955
F 20001–25000 — 03/1955 to 07/1956
Q 30001–33000 — 07/1956 to 09/1957
R 33001–34000 — 11/1956 to 04/1958
L 85001–87000 — 04/1958 to 02/1961 		No figure published
  1. The published block table starts before the model does. Its first IIa block, P 97001–100000, is dated 11/1949 to 06/1950, where this entry and camera-wiki date the camera's introduction to 1950; the cameras in that block were built before the launch.
  2. Two datings of the dial change, and they do not quite agree. The block table puts the last mechanical-sync IIa at 10/1953 and the first PC-sync one at 11/1953, which matches the reported change "from around November 1953"; this entry dates the colour dial from 1954, and Henry Scherer, who repairs these cameras, puts it at "sometime in about 1953 or 1954" in one article and "sometime in 1954" in the next paragraph of the same page. Both are recorded here.
  3. Blocks are allocations, not counts. The letter blocks were shared with every other Zeiss Ikon camera and not every number in one was issued, so the six colour-dial IIa blocks — which span about 23,000 numbers — cannot be read as cameras built. Scherer's estimate is that "perhaps no more than 3,000" colour-dial IIa bodies were made, and that roughly ten IIIa cameras left the factory for every IIa. Camerapedia gives 25,000 black-dial and 44,025 colour-dial cameras for 1951–53 and 1953–62, but those figures cover the IIa and the IIIa together.
  4. Two transcriptions of the block table were consulted and they agree throughout bar one digit: the colour-dial B block reads 90,000–95,000 in one and 90,001–95,000 in the other.
  5. An independent account of the camera was found and it corroborates the substance without touching the numbers. Pierpaolo Ghisetti, writing on marcocavina.com in 2015, has the IIa designed at Stuttgart from 1948 and presented in 1950; a body a centimetre lower than the Contax II with the overhanging front removed; a new vertical-travel shutter, more compact, smoother and more reliable than its predecessor; a rangefinder base cut back so that coupling reaches 135mm where the II reached 18cm; and the accessory shoe marked Zeiss Ikon Stuttgart. He also ties the black-numbered and coloured-numbered cameras to the arrival of flash synchronisation, which is the same account of the dial change given here from other sources. Most of the postwar patents, he notes, are again in Heinz Kuppenbender's name — the man who led the Contax II project at Dresden, and who after the split headed the Stuttgart group.
  6. Two end dates, and the difference is real. This entry runs the camera to 1961 on the serial blocks, whose last colour-dial block is dated to 02/1961. Ghisetti says production stopped in 1958 and cameras were sold until 1960, and separately that the Contax camera line was officially closed in 1960 while lens supply continued to 1962 — the 1961/62 Zeiss Ikon catalogue still gives the system five pages and eight lenses. A block dated 1961 and a line closed in 1960 are not necessarily in conflict: a block is an allocation and cameras in it could be shipped after assembly stopped. Both are recorded.
  7. Corroboration searched for and not found, on the one thing this page leans on hardest. The letter-and-block table with months attached — the finest dating available for the camera — still traces to a single list, transcribed twice. Ghisetti, who publishes batch numbers and dates for the Contax lenses, gives no serial blocks at all for the bodies; camera-wiki gives only the coarse letter-to-year table and cites the same list behind it. Until a second, independent transcription of Zeiss Ikon's Stuttgart body records appears, the month-level dates above should be read as one source's reading of the factory books.
  8. Context from Ghisetti that the postwar figures need. Prewar Dresden built 59,500 Contax II and 38,000 Contax III to 1945, and about 800 more Contax II were assembled from leftover parts at Saalfeld near Jena in 1945–47 — the bodies that stand between the Contax II and the Kiev. He also records a Contax IV that never shipped: prototypes marked VK 21 and VK 27, with a wind lever, a three-frame finder and a built-in selenium meter, dropped when Zeiss Ikon concluded the rangefinder era was ending and moved its effort to the Contarex.
  9. A compatibility trap worth knowing before buying: the aluminium shutter slats of the IIa and IIIa are thicker than the prewar brass ones, and the prewar Biogon 35mm f/2.8 will touch them. Mounting that lens on this camera damages the rear element.
How to tell them apart (expand)
  • About 20% smaller than a Contax II — 520 g against 610, and 135 × 77.8 × 49.9 mm
  • A 73mm rangefinder base, REDUCED from the prewar camera's 90mm
  • The rangefinder couples to 135mm; the Contax II coupled to 180mm — the same loss stated as a working limit
  • Body about 1 cm lower than the Contax II, and the front is flat where the II's overhangs
  • Accessory shoe engraved Zeiss Ikon Stuttgart, where the prewar camera's says Dresden
  • Shutter curtains connected by gears rather than cloth straps
  • Painted aluminium shutter slats in place of brass

Black dial:

  • Shutter speeds engraved in black
  • A proprietary flash socket needing an adapter for a standard PC cable

Colour dial:

  • Shutter speeds marked in different colours
  • A standard PC flash socket

Serial-range notes

one letter and five digits
THE RULE. Zeiss Ikon kept its prewar camera numbering after the war — a letter followed by a five-digit number, a new letter every 99,999 — and the western half in Stuttgart ran a fresh letter sequence: P = 1949/50, S = 1950/51, T = 1951, U, V and X = 1952, Y = 1952/53, A and B = 1953/55, C = 1954/55, D = 1955/56, F = 1956, L = 1956/61, O = 1956/57, Q = 1960, R = 1961/62. Read the letter first; it is the year. Note that the letters repeat the prewar alphabet, so a IIa cannot be dated against the Dresden table — the same letter means a different decade.
P 97001–100000 through A 43001–46001
The black-dial IIa, block by block, with the months given: P 97001–100000 for 11/1949 to 06/1950; S 20001–28000 for 07/1950 to 04/1951; T 5001–9000 for 03/1951 to 07/1951; T 28001–35000 for 08/1951 to 12/1951; U 1–5000 for 01/1952 to 05/1952; V 15001–20000 for 07/1952 to 08/1952; X 1–3000 for 09/1952 to 10/1952; Y 57001–62001 for 11/1952 to 03/1953; A 43001–46001 for 04/1953 to 10/1953. This is the finest published dating for the camera — to the month rather than the year — and camera-wiki cites the same list behind its West German letter table.
A 46000–53000 through L 85001–87000
The colour-dial IIa, block by block: A 46000–53000 for 11/1953 to 09/1954; B 90000–95000 for 10/1954 to 02/1955; F 20001–25000 for 03/1955 to 07/1956; Q 30001–33000 for 07/1956 to 09/1957; R 33001–34000 for 11/1956 to 04/1958; L 85001–87000 for 04/1958 to 02/1961. The A block straddles the change: A 43001–46001 is black dial, A 46000 upward is colour dial, and the two published segments overlap by two numbers.
the block, read as a dial
The practical use of the table is that it separates the two variants without opening the camera. Everything from P to the low A block is mechanical flash sync and a black speed dial; everything from A 46000 upward is the internal PC-socket camera with the coloured dial. A body whose dial and block disagree has had a top plate changed, or is one of the home conversions Henry Scherer warns against — he reports black-dial cameras fitted with a PC socket, which ruins the shutter action and cannot be undone.
the IIIa's blocks, which are different
The IIa and the IIIa drew on the same letter sequence but different segments of it, so the two postwar models CAN be told apart by serial where the prewar II and III cannot. The IIa takes T 5001–9000 and T 28001–35000 where the IIIa takes T 35001–40000; V 15001–20000 against the IIIa's V 20001–25000; Y 57001–62001 against the IIIa's Y 52001–57000; A 43001–53000 against the IIIa's A 53001–63000.
the cold shoe, and inside the camera
Where to look. Camerapedia records the accessory shoe engraved "Zeiss Ikon, Stuttgart, Germany" with the serial number, and the number repeated inside the camera. A shoe number with no matching internal one is worth questioning on a camera whose top plates are interchangeable.
the number on the lens
A separate sequence. Carl Zeiss numbered lenses in one continuous run across every type, and after the war the run forked: Oberkochen in the West restarted at 10000 and reached 500000 by 1951, 1100000 by 1953, 2600000 by 1959 and 3000000 by 1961, while Carl Zeiss Jena in the East resumed above 3000000. A postwar Contax lens numbered in the hundreds of thousands is West German; one numbered in the millions with a red T and an alloy barrel is East German. Neither number has anything to do with the body's.

Specifications

Format
24×36mm on 35mm film, removable back
Finder
Combined viewfinder and coupled rangefinder, 1mm larger than the Contax II's
Base length
73 mm
Shutter
vertical-travel aluminium slat, gear-connected · T, B, 1, 2, 5, 10, 25, 50, 100, 250, 500, 1250
Weight
520 g
Dimensions
135 × 77.8 × 49.9 mm
Country
Germany

Figures we worked out rather than found: 73mm against 90mm is a 19% reduction in rangefinder base — the postwar Contax focuses less precisely than the prewar one · 520 g against 610 g, in a body 20% smaller by eye

Where sources disagree

Whether the IIa is an improvement on the II
  • Yes: smaller, lighter, a more reliable shutter, flash sync, a bigger finder image
  • No: the rangefinder base drops from 90mm to 73mm, which is a loss of focusing precision

Better supported: Both, and the base length is the one thing that got worse

Every other change is a gain. The 90mm base was the Contax's central advantage over the Leica, and the postwar camera gives up nearly a fifth of it. Ghisetti states the same loss as a working limit rather than a measurement: the Contax II's rangefinder coupled to lenses up to 18cm, the IIa's only to 135mm.

How many IIa bodies were built, and how the IIa compares with the IIIa
  • Henry Scherer: perhaps no more than 3,000 colour-dial IIa bodies, and roughly ten IIIa cameras left the factory for every IIa
  • Pierpaolo Ghisetti: 66,000 Contax IIa against 69,000 Contax IIIa — 135,000 postwar bodies in all
  • Camerapedia: 25,000 black-dial and 44,025 colour-dial cameras, for the IIa and IIIa together

These cannot all be true. Scherer, who repairs these cameras and sees what comes through the door, has the IIIa outnumbering the IIa ten to one; Ghisetti, reading production records, has them almost level and both far larger than Scherer's figure. Camerapedia's totals sit between the two but do not separate the models, so they cannot arbitrate. No source consulted shows its working. A repairer's sample is not a production record, and a production record is not a survival rate — both may be reporting honestly about different things. One arithmetic point is worth carrying while the question stays open: Camerapedia's two figures sum to 69,025 for the IIa and the IIIa together, which is within twenty-five of Ghisetti's figure for the IIIa alone. That may be coincidence, or it may mean one of the two counts both models. Nothing consulted decides which, and no reading of it would rescue Scherer's 3,000.

What reviewers say

History

The IIa is the Contax rebuilt by the half of Zeiss Ikon that still existed in the West. The Dresden factory, its tooling and much of its personnel had gone to Kyiv as reparations; Stuttgart started again, and in 1950 produced a camera about a fifth smaller than the Contax II, 90 grams lighter, with the shutter curtains connected by gears instead of cloth straps and painted aluminium slats in place of brass.

Almost every change is an improvement. The shutter is more reliable and can now change speeds when it is partly wound, which the prewar camera could not. Flash synchronisation arrives at 1/25. The finder image is a millimetre larger. The film counter moves somewhere sensible.

One change is a loss, and it is the one that mattered most about a Contax. The rangefinder base drops from 90mm to 73mm — a fifth of the camera’s central advantage over the Leica, given away. A IIa focuses a fast lens less precisely than a II does.

Two practical notes. From 1954 the shutter speeds are marked in colours rather than black, and the proprietary flash socket becomes a standard PC one, so a colour-dial camera is easier to live with — the same distinction, in the same years, that separates a black-dial Leica IIIf from a red-dial one. And the thicker aluminium slats mean the prewar Biogon 35mm f/2.8 must not be mounted on this camera: its rear element touches the shutter and is damaged by it.

Expand Collapse

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 IIa
Contax IIa, black dial — s58y, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
Contax IIa
Contax IIa — Gisling, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Live listings

Asking price, USD: a median of $350 across 61 fixed-price listings on 2026-09-11 (middle half $220–$450). Tracked since 2026-09-06, 3 days: up 6% from $330.

By day
DateMedianMiddle halfListings
2026-09-11$350$220–$45061
2026-09-08$350$220–$45061
2026-09-06$330$220–$43063

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 II · Contax IIIa

Lenses for this body: Biogon 21mm f/4.5 · Biogon 3.5cm f/2.8 · 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 5cm f/3.5

Sources (9)

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.