I wonder if I'm struggling with the volume of contaxinfo.coms which come my way for a reason:
is there a digest version?
Will, I'm amazed at your camera collection! I've lived off a T2, 167MT and not much else (I still have the Zenith 12XP which I brought with 3 years pocket money......but there's clearly no pretention towards Carl Zeiss here... ahem). I'd dithered over the Aria for years, and only swooned to release my credit card when I wandered into a shop intending to find a flashgun. If the Aria had been marketed with a trombone zoom, I'd have already ignored it like the N1 and other plastic extrusions displayed in velvet display cases.
Still, the handling weight and the tactile quality and of the Aria left me marvelling at the engineered seduction of Contax's engineers. These clever people have clearly done their homework, and appreciated a market of travel photographers to small-fingered people (and women enthusiasts I hear, who particularly were targetted by Contax at some stage). It's like discovering Peggy's Cove on an empty lighthouse lit night all alone - serendipity in an urban wilderness. Well, maybe another metaphor will do. I rant not. The Contax' brochure for the Aria had really perturbed me for its feather lightweight portrayal of a little run of the mill camera, with flouncines prancing all over along with matrix metering (no offence to technophiles, however I still use incident light to shape my pictures). It'd left me holding onto my old 167MT even tighter (or was that the osteoporosis at work?). Anyway, the luxury of having such a choice of cameras like yours could mean an RX on Mondays, GR1V Tuesdays, G2 on Wednesdays and the Aria for the rest of the week, or perhaps along some other logical basis!
Actually, having trekked around in the micro-cold climates which we have in this bizarre part of the world to test out the Aria, (i.e. England), I think I'm just about to be laid over with pneumonia for the start of the year. Clearly the price of enthusiasm.
Well Craig, thanks for enlightening me about AEL and its conundrums too. Learning how to walk and chew gum with the Aria is more like a gentle smack on the lips at the moment for me. So once I get over (or on with) the wonders of, er, chewing the AEL lock with my middle lip whilst watching the viewfinder with my finger, I'll know I'll have mastered something to be proud of, even if at the moment I'm not quite sure what...it'll come to me and then I'm be squinting in the sun without overexposing.
Kind regards,
Joe Tweed