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

Contax T2

Kyocera · Fixed lens · 24×36mm on 35mm film, hinged back · 1990

Also known as: Contax T2 · Kyocera Contax T2 · Contax T2 Titanium · Contax T2 60 Years · コンタックスT2

Variants & identification

Variant Mount Years Serial ranges Production
T2, titanium silver (champagne) 35mm compact 1990 — No figure published
T2, titanium black 35mm compact 1990 — No figure published
T2 Limited Black (jet black) 35mm compact — — No figure published in any source consulted
T2 Gold, 60 Years anniversary edition 35mm compact 1992–1992 — 6,000 worldwide, stated in Kyocera's own two-language sales leaflet; submin.com says 1,600 — see disputed
T2 Platinum 35mm compact — — 1,100 pieces, per submin.com. No manufacturer source found
T2 with quartz data back 35mm compact — — No separate figure published
  1. No production figure has ever been published for the ordinary T2 — the camera that made the whole premium-compact market, and there is no number for it at all. What exists are edition figures for three of the special finishes, and only one of those comes from Kyocera.
  2. The one manufacturer figure in the family: Kyocera's leaflet for the 60 Years edition, printed in German, English and French, states in all three that the edition is limited to six thousand pieces worldwide, describes 24-carat gold plating of the top and bottom covers and the lens barrel, and specifies the walnut box and leather case. It is signed by Kyocera Corporation's Optical Equipment Group with the addresses of the Yashica Kyocera distributors in Hamburg, Vienna, Thalwil, Villepinte and Reading. A scan is hosted at contax-cameras.reconact.com.
  3. A stated edition limit and a production total are different facts. Nothing found here says how many of the six thousand were actually built and sold, and the same caution applies to submin.com's 1,100 platinum cameras.
  4. Trade listings and enthusiast writing sometimes distinguish a plain gold T2 from the 60 Years edition. Every gold T2 documented in the sources consulted here is the 60 Years camera — gold covers and lens barrel over a matt black front — and no source consulted shows a separately catalogued all-gold body.
  5. No designer credit has been found for the T2 in any source consulted. The Contax T of 1984 carries a Porsche Design credit in almost everything written about it; nothing comparable is published for its successor, and the assumption that the credit carries forward is an assumption.
  6. The price story is not a specification but it is why the camera is written about. The Phoblographer traces the rise to Terry Richardson's part in starting the compact-camera revival and then to Kendall Jenner appearing on television with a titanium black T2, followed by Aziz Ansari, Frank Ocean and Chris Hemsworth. Its author reports buying one for about $50 three years before writing in 2018 and refusing $170 for it afterwards.
How to tell them apart (expand)
  • A motorised titanium lens cover that opens and retracts on its own, replacing the Contax T's fold-down drawbridge
  • An aperture ring on the lens barrel with an A position — the control almost no other autofocus compact of the period offered, and the reason photographers rather than collectors want one
  • A built-in flash, bought at the cost of the accessory shoe: the T's bolt-on T14 has no equivalent here
  • The same optical prescription as the 1984 Contax T — a 38mm f/2.8 Sonnar T*, five elements in four groups

T2, titanium silver (champagne):

  • Natural titanium top and bottom covers over a black body — the standard finish and by far the commonest

T2, titanium black:

  • Black-finished titanium covers, regular catalogue production — not the same thing as the Limited Black

T2 Limited Black (jet black):

  • A deeper, near-matte black than the standard titanium black finish

T2 Gold, 60 Years anniversary edition:

  • 24-carat gold plating on the top and bottom covers and the lens barrel, over a matt black front engraved Contax 60 Years
  • Solid walnut presentation box with a matt finish and a dark brown leather case

T2 Platinum:

  • Platinum-plated body with an ostrich-leather grip, supplied in a presentation case

T2 with quartz data back:

  • A date imprint window and controls on the back door

Specifications

Format
24×36mm on 35mm film, hinged back
Finder
Combined viewfinder with projected framelines, parallax correction and a shutter-speed readout · 0.75× magnification · no rangefinder image
Shutter
leaf shutter, electronically timed · 1/500 s at the fast end, which every source agrees on. The slow limit does not agree with itself: 60 s per Emulsive, 10 minutes per submin.com. See disputed. · self-timer
Film advance
motorised: auto load, advance and rewind
Back
hinged, with a quartz data back offered as a factory option
Meter
Aperture-priority and programmed AE, with ±2 EV of exposure compensation in 1/3-stop steps and apertures from f/2.8 to f/16. Film speed by DX coding, quoted as ISO 25–5000 by Emulsive.
Weight
295 g
Dimensions
119 wide × 66 high × 33 deep (Emulsive, which prints the figures in the order 119 × 33 × 66 as width, depth, height) mm
Country
Japan
Accessories
Quartz data back (factory option) · Leather case; the platinum edition's case is part of the edition

The 0.75× magnification is Emulsive's figure and is given there as approximate. There is no rangefinder: focus is by active infrared, with a manual override.

Where sources disagree

Year of introduction
  • 1990 (Japan Camera Hunter; the Phoblographer; submin.com)
  • 1991 (Casual Photophile's T-series buyer's guide; Emulsive's compact camera mega-test)

Better supported: 1990, on weight of sources only

Three against two, with no manufacturer announcement on either side. A one-year gap of this kind usually means a Japanese announcement in one year and a Western on-sale date in the next, but no source consulted says so, and inventing that explanation would be exactly the sort of tidy guess this entry exists to avoid.

60 Years gold edition, quantity
  • 6,000 worldwide (Kyocera's own sales leaflet for the edition)
  • 1,600, described as "only 1600 made" (submin.com)

Better supported: Kyocera's leaflet

The manufacturer's own document beats a collector page, and the two figures share their digits in an order that suggests a transcription slip rather than independent counting. Recorded rather than silently corrected, because the 1,600 figure is what circulates and a reader who has met it needs to see both.

End of production
  • No end date at all: English Wikipedia's article on the Contax T line gives the T2 as "Introduced in 1991" and stops there, while dating the line as a whole "from 1984 through 2002"
  • 2002, as the end of the T line rather than of this camera — the same Wikipedia sentence, read as if it applied model by model
  • 2001, the year the T3 arrived, which is when writers commonly assume the T2 stopped

Better supported: None — `years.last` is deliberately unset

This entry previously carried 2001 as a hard end year. Nothing consulted here supports it. The T3's arrival is not evidence that the T2 stopped, and a range printed for a whole product line is not a range for one model in it; Kyocera did not announce a discontinuation for the T2 and left the camera business altogether in 2005. Rather than pick between an inference and a line total, the field is left empty. A camera whose production span cannot be stated is a more useful entry than one that states it wrongly.

Shutter, slowest speed
  • 60 s (Emulsive, compact camera mega-test)
  • 10 minutes (submin.com, repeated identically on its titanium, black and gold pages)

An order of magnitude apart, on a camera whose manual would settle it in one line. This project has not read the manual; until it does, both figures stand.

What reviewers say

History

The T2 is the most written-about compact camera in existence and nobody has published how many were made. That is the fact this page exists to state, because everything else about the camera — the titanium, the Sonnar, the aperture ring, the price — is repeated in a hundred places, and the number is repeated nowhere, including by the trade that calls two of its finishes strictly limited.

Start with what changed from the Contax T. The optical prescription did not: it is the same 38mm f/2.8 Sonnar T*, five elements in four groups. The focusing did — active infrared autofocus with a manual override, in place of the T’s coincident-image rangefinder. The front door did: a motorised titanium cover retracts instead of folding down. And the flash came inside, at the cost of the accessory shoe, which is a straight trade rather than an improvement. What survived is the thing that keeps photographers interested three decades on: an aperture ring on the lens barrel with an A position, on an autofocus point-and-shoot, in 1990.

The variant table is finishes and one data back, and it splits into two halves by how well it is documented. The champagne titanium and the catalogue black are ordinary production with no figure attached to either. The special editions are where the numbers live, and there are three of them. The Limited Black — the deeper, near-matte one, not the catalogue black — has no published quantity at all; a figure of a thousand for the Japanese market circulates on social media and is left out of this entry for that reason. The Platinum, with its ostrich-leather grip and its three-thousand-dollar price, is put at 1,100 pieces by submin.com and by nothing else found here.

The exception is the 60 Years edition of 1992, and it is a real one. Kyocera printed a sales leaflet for it in German, English and French, and the English column states that the edition “is limited to six thousand pieces worldwide”, with 24-carat gold on the top and bottom covers and the lens barrel, a matt black front engraved Contax 60 Years, a solid walnut box and a leather case. That is a manufacturer’s document with a quantity in it, which makes it the only hard number in the whole family. submin.com’s page for the same camera says only 1,600 were made. The leaflet wins, but the smaller figure is what circulates, so both are recorded above. And a stated limit is still not a count: the leaflet says how many Kyocera undertook not to exceed, not how many left the factory.

The rest is honest disagreement, and it starts at both ends of the run. Half the sources date the camera to 1990 and half to 1991, with no announcement document on either side. The other end is worse: nobody dates it at all. English Wikipedia introduces the T2 in 1991 and never says when it stopped, giving 1984 to 2002 for the whole T line instead; the 2001 that circulates is the year the T3 appeared, which is a guess wearing a date’s clothes. This entry carries no end year for that reason. The fast end of the shutter is 1/500 everywhere; the slow end is sixty seconds in one place and ten minutes in another. No designer is credited anywhere — the Porsche Design attribution belongs to the 1984 Contax T, and carrying it forward to the T2 is something writers do rather than something a source says. A buyer looking at a listing can settle the finish from the photographs, and can settle almost nothing else.

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.

Example photos

Sample photo taken with the Contax T2
Contax T2 — MIKI Yoshihito. (#mikiyoshihito), via Flickr (Openverse) (CC BY 2.0)
Sample photo taken with the Contax T2
Tokyo Tower — shot on a Contax T2 (MIKI Yoshihito) — MIKI Yoshihito from Sapporo City,Hokkaido., JAPAN, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Sample photo wanted — shot with a Contax T2? We'd love to feature it (with credit).

Live listings

Asking price, USD: a median of $1,200 across 192 fixed-price listings on 2026-09-11 (middle half $1,100–$1,500). Tracked since 2026-09-06, 3 days: unchanged from $1,200.

By day
DateMedianMiddle halfListings
2026-09-11$1,200$1,100–$1,500192
2026-09-08$1,200$1,100–$1,500190
2026-09-06$1,200$1,100–$1,500190

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

Show 475 more listings

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

Related: Contax T · Fujifilm Klasse · Olympus mju-II · Yashica T series

Sources (10)

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.