>>3901075>There is no synching required, it is simply a matter of the activating-lever being literally in front of the shutter-release button.The syncing is required if you want this to happen automatically, in a fraction of a second, instead of stopping down manually every time before taking the shot.
> Also, I have eight Contarexes and have not taken one out yet because it is simply too good for me to use at the moment.Yeah I know what you mean. For me they're probably the most overbuilt and complicated cameras to be made. But because of that, they're big and very heavy, you could be carrying a small medium format camera for the same weight.
Also, they have many "firsts" but those weren't perfected yet, like the finger wheel for aperture control and full aperture metering.
What they nailed though, was lens design - both optically but also externally, they look much more modern than they are, and fit and finish.
>>3901182>You are forgetting about old lenses and how they operated. Auto aperture is a relatively recent development.I'm not forgetting, this is my point exactly. People now take it for granted, but it wasn't so.
And without auto aperture, SLRs become slower and more cumbersome to use than the RFs of old (I mean the ones that existed in the late 40's to late 50's).
This wasn't a very trivial issue to solve, in interchangeable lens cameras. Even much later up to modern times, tilt/shift lenses for instance many times had a lever to stop down the aperture before the shot, cause they couldn't find a good way to reliably do it automatically, with all the moving parts (before electronically controlled apertures obviously).
Also, Exacta clearly were pioneers. But keep in mind, on top of other small inconveniences, they were very expensive, some of the most expensive cameras of the time when introduced, surpassing Zeiss and Leica rangefinders.
Add to that all the small inconveniences and that people are resistant to change, that made it a hard sell.
