Amedeo Muscelli's Contax-to-Leica Adapter August 2009 Amedeo Muscelli's beautifully made new adapter. Amedeo Muscelli's new Contax-to-Leica adapters (that is, to mount Contax rangefinder lenses onto Leica rangefinder cameras) have been appearing on eBay off and on for a couple of months now. His old ones used the actual helical from a parts camera, but he is now milling his own adapters, complete with a new spring-loaded arm to hold the lens tab steady. Amedeo is a hobbyist living in Venezuela, so I was quite surprised to notice, upon receiving my adapter, that build quality is amazing. Focus is extremely smooth, perhaps a little too free for my taste--I would have preferred a bit more damping. The adapter is heavy and the parts are precisely machined. Overall the impression is of great handmade quality. Cost was $250 shipped--expensive, but quite a bit cheaper than what you'd pay for the Leica-thread-mount versions of Zeiss's great normal lenses, the Sonnar 50mm f/1.5 and Sonnar 50mm f/2. (In addition, I don't believe there ever were Leica-mount versions of the two 50mm Tessars, correct me if I'm wrong.) The adapter will not mount wider Contax RF lenses (Amedeo makes a separate adapter for that), but it will mount the longer ones. The Helios-103 on the R-D1, bought NOS from Fedka.com. There is no Leica version of this lens. The adapter was a little tight on the R-D1 the first time I installed it, but it loosened up within a couple of tries and now feels perfect. It mounts on the Leica M2 and Bessa R4A with equal ease. I only have two Contax-mount lenses at the moment, neither of which I'd even tried yet. The first, a Carl Zeiss Jena Sonnar 50/1.5, mounted and latched smoothly. Focus was way off, though. Like, way, way off. For a moment I thought it was the adapter, but it turns out it was the lens. I have since had it adjusted by Sonnar nerd Brian Sweeney, and it's working fine. The lens in the photo above is the Helios-103, a Planar-type (I think) made for the Kiev line of Contax copies from the former Soviet Union. Yuri at Fedka.com had a NOS sample of the Helios for $37.50--an amazing price for a great lens, especially one for which there is no Leica-mount version, and which I'd always wanted to try. As it happens, I had a lot of trouble mounting it: the barrel was slightly too thick for the adapter. I ended up filing down the edge of the lens barrel a bit (this is a thing you can do freely with a forty-dollar optic), and once I managed to get it on, I took it off and remounted it a few times. It's pretty smooth now--I think the adapter will just have to be broken in a little, same with the lens. The tab on the Helios is much thinner than the chunky tab on the Zeiss lenses, so unfortuantely it doesn't click home the way the Sonnar does. (The Helios does click home on the Contax IIa.) The spring action on the adapter's custom arm is rather weak compared to the stiff arm of the IIa, but ultimately I think Amedeo's design is very elegant and well-executed, and is likely to be great with your Zeiss lenses. I figured my test photos would be kinda crappy, to tell you the truth. I was, after all, taking a 1980's Soviet lens, mounting it on a homemade hunk of metal made by some guy in South America I've never met, and attaching the whole thing to an obsolete digital camera notorious for rangefinder misalignment. However, check it out: focus was perfect. These photos are all wide open, I am pretty sure (that is, at f/1.8), and wouldn't you know it, the Helios-103 is actually kind of awesome. Contrast is a little low wide open, as you'd imagine, though not nearly as much as I expected--these are completely unretouched out of Lightroom--and I quite like the bokeh. All in all, Amedeo has an amazing product here, and I recommend it! I was focusing on the dried-up leaf to the left of center. Not bad! c2009 by J. Robert Lennon.