It’s all about the lens, everything else is just a box (or “house,” from the Latin). Zeiss lenses have the the most striking contrast, and few competitors can even hold a candle to their quality. Contax has been around for a long time, I have a Contax from the fifties, and I still use it occasionally, happily. It’s built like a steel brick, and for portraiture it does all I need–exclude light from the body, open and close the shutter (how accurately, I don’t know, if you bracket, you don’t care), and it has that super-contrasty, super-fast Zeiss lens.
I few years ago, I had become kind of jaded about lenses. Gods teeth, my enlarger has a Zeiss lens, and my throw away lenses are all Rokkor on the Minolta equipment. I was shooting a garden in Japan, and half way through a big roll of Pan-X, I decided I wanted to shoot in color. Stupidly, I mentioned something about burning the last of the roll, as I had only brought one back for the 35mm camera. A friend of mine, who is an artist, offered to let me use her Canon. I looked at it, and knew there was something wrong with the lens, slow for one thing, but the light was bright, so I declined saying that I could never get beyond all the bells and whistles on the camera. When she said she could put it in full manual mode, I felt like it would be an insult, and oh so very un-Japanese to not accept her kind offer, and thought “what could it hurt.”
Well, through the viewfinder, It all looks the same, and it wasn’t until I saw the film that I realized that there wasn’t a single exposure that was usable. This garden, so breathtaking, that the “thousand words” you ought to have, couldn’t even come close to describing it’s beauty, was flat, boring and lifeless. Everything, everything. everything was bilirubin brown and over-cooked spinach green. Except for a few frames I shot on the Rollie (2 1/4 format, but still the wrong film) the entire shot was wasted. From then on, if I drop a Rokkor off a cliff face, I’ll watch where it drops (bad manners to litter) but I’ll hit the ground before a Zeiss. In your photography, you’ll find you can compensate for a lot of things, on the shoot, or in the darkroom, but a crappy lens is a crappy lens, and if you can’t get the image on the film, you won’t be able to put it on the paper.
Re-acquaint that lens and body, I think you’ve got a real gem there. Outside of “Bob’s House 'o Cameras” Contax is a well respected and venerable name, truly a “pro” box. Never, use duct tape on a camera, properly, you use gaffer’s tape. If your trying to protect it from theft, mark it up in bizarre places with tape, and complain loudly about having to frame wide, to crop out the light leaks. An amateur probably won’t steal your Contax, but a pro would be sorely tempted.