A month ago I bought an old Contax G1 camera on eBay. I loaded it with some Kodak Gold 200 film from the lokal supermarket (waiting for a few rolls of Tri-X 400 to arrive) and gave it a test run. The Contax is pretty heavy when carried around with one hand – a lot heavier than my Fuji X100 and my NEX-7. It feels very solid and gives a great feeling when operated. Some people complain about “small and dark” viewfinder, but I found it OK.
Because both the autofocus the film drive are motor-driven, the camera is not exactly quiet and low profile. The X100 is much easier to carry around and point at someone, taking candid shots.
{If you would like to use any of my photos, please consider them as published under the “creative commons” licence (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons for details). In short: you may use any of these photos as long as you do not charge for them, and you have to mention my name as the owner/author in a clearly visible way. In simple words: feel free to use, but give credit and don’t steel.
Time.Captured. (Karsten Seiferlin)}
The first roll came out quite OK. Only very few photos were out of focus, and two of them because I had put the camera to MF and forgot to engage AF again. The grain was much more prominent than I had though, but otherwise the quality was just fine: colour, exposure and contrast turned out pretty much OK. Unfortunately the scans that were produced by the photo lab (standard order, no special scanning service) have only 4 MPx and don’t give much reserve for cropping, if any.