The Contax RTS (1975) was a premium quality SLR camera produced by

Yashica was a Japanese manufacturer of cameras, lenses, and film editing equipment active from 1949 until 2005 when its then-owner, Kyocera, ceased production. It acquired the lens manufacturer Tomioka (Tomioka Optical Co., Ltd). In 2008, the Yashica ...

under licence from

Zeiss (company) Zeiss ( ; ) is a German manufacturer of optics, optical systems and optoelectronics, founded in Jena, Germany, in 1846 by optician Carl Zeiss. Together with Ernst Abbe (joined 1866) and Otto Schott (joined 1884) he laid the foundation for tod ...

who produced all the very high quality optics. The first RTS (short for "Real Time System") was designed by Prof. Dr. Katsuiko Sugaya, styled by the Porsche Design studio, and manufactured by Yashica as ''Top Secret Project 130''. The cameras were designed to compete with, and priced comparably to, the Leica R series in the high-end professional market. The RTS was followed by the RTS II in 1982, which added TTL flash metering and a titanium shutter. In 1983 Yashica was acquired by

Kyocera is a Japanese Multinational corporation, multinational ceramics and electronics manufacturer headquartered in Kyoto, Japan. It was founded as in 1959 by Kazuo Inamori and renamed in 1982. It manufactures industrial ceramics, solar power genera ...

, and in 1990 the RTS III added a Kyocera-designed ceramic vacuum film pressure plate.

References

External links

Contax RTS on camdex.fr
Yashica SLR cameras Cameras introduced in 1975 {{camera-stub