The top of the Contax TVS is clean and smart. There are just a few controls on the TVS and they’re mainly useful ones. To my eyes this is not a particularly beautiful camera, rather an efficient looking thing in the manner of much luxe industrial design from the 90s. The ‘executive lounge’ feel carries through to the whole design of the TVS. I’ll start with the superficial stuff… Packaging

The TVS is not for everyone and not for every photographic situation but, these days, I think there are lots of good subjective reasons to consider it. But here on 35mmc objectivity is only ever part of the story. Those are fine machines – the internet is right, they are objectively ‘better’ in many technical respects. Hamish has written about the Contax T3 and T2 (and more recently the TVS II and TVS III), and I can vouch also for the T2 and TVS III as well. It cost a whopping £1000 new – plus quite a bit more for extras! These days it’s overshadowed by its more famous fixed lens cousins in the T range and by later model TVS zooms. The TVS was Contax’s flagship zoom in the ‘dentist’s camera’ category. When the TVS came out in 1994 most of the big camera makers were competing to outdo each other at the luxury end of the compact market. I had modest expectations which were mainly exceeded. I was feeling a Contax-shaped hole in my life after selling an underused T2 and knackered TVS-III a year or so previously. I bought my TVS on a whim from Ebay last year. I’ve found myself using mine a lot for casual photography so thought readers of 35mmc might be interested in hearing more. It’s nicely built, well designed and not outrageously expensive. The TVS does a very good job at pretty much all the things I want from a camera like this and it does those things in a pleasurable and tactile way. Its body is made out of Titanium, it has a really nice Zeiss Vario-Sonar zoom lens and a good range of sensible manual controls. The Contax TVS is a fancy compact zoom camera from the mid nineties.

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