by TRA
The History of the Pentacon Six
The
Contax S
Contax decided to build the Flektoscope
mirror housing into the camera body. This would in
fact convert the rangefinder Contax into a 35mm Single
Lens Reflex Contax – a “Spiegel-Contax” (“Mirror
Contax”) or “Contax S”. A 35mm SLR had of course
been produced by Exakta & the oddly-shaped Russian
Sport in 1936, but the new Contax was to add to the body
a fixed pentaprism, giving eye-level viewing with an
image that was the right way-up and the right way
round. During the war, the company was unable to
produce the camera, but in 1948 the Contax S was finally
produced by the original Contax factory in
Dresden. The camera itself bore the Zeiss Ikon
logo but only the name “Contax”, with the “S” being
added only in printed literature. (Hummel
p.207) It abandoned the bayonet lens mounts of the
pre-war Contax (there were two of them on each camera!),
and adopted the M 42×1 screw thread that had been
developed by another firm, Kamera-Werkstätten,
Niedersedlitz, Dresden, for their Praktica cameras.
 The first Contax S of 1948 or 1949 Notice the black stud convering the hole where there was meant to be a delayed-action lever: severe post-war shortages meant that the lever and its mechanism were not available when the camera was first released! Illustration from Mesow, Wolfgang & Kuhn, Heinz, “Photography: 150 Years Cameras from Dresden“, VEB Pentacon Dresden, 1989 |
The camera was a world-wide success, but
the new Contax company in Stuttgart, West Germany was
getting ready to re-start production of Contax
rangefinder cameras which were only slightly modified
from the pre-war versions.
 [C371_16A.jpg] A post-war Contax III (known as the “IIIa”) from the Zeiss Ikon factory in Stuttgart, West Germany |
Zeiss Ikon West Germany initiated legal action to prevent the Dresden factory using the Zeiss Ikon and Contax names on their new camera.
For information on a special, probably
unique, Contax S, see here.
To go to the Bibliography, click here.
To go on to the next section, click
below.
04 The Contax D and
E
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© TRA August 2010 Latest revision: May 2017