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Bessa R2S / R2C

Cosina Voigtländer · Nikon S + Contax RF mount · 24×36mm · 2002

our own finding

Also known as: Voigtländer Bessa R2S · Voigtländer Bessa R2C · Voigtlander Bessa R2S · Voigtlander Bessa R2C · Bessa-R2S · Bessa-R2C · Cosina Bessa R2S · Cosina Bessa R2C · ベッサR2S · ベッサR2C · Bessa R2S NHS · Bessa R2S ICS

Variants & identification

Variant Mount Years Serial ranges Production
Bessa R2S Nikon S 2002–2005 — Unpublished. Cosina has never given a figure; a little over 1,000 bodies circulates as a Japanese dealer's claim, made in a social-media post and confirmed nowhere else.
Bessa R2C Contax RF 2002–2005 — Unpublished, and unlike the R2S no figure of any kind has ever been put on it. One collector who owns both reports the Contax-mount body surfacing less often than the Nikon-mount one.
Bessa R2S Special Set for NHS Nikon S 2005–2005 — 500 sets is the figure in circulation, from a Japanese retailer's 2013 feature and from dealer listings, none of them now reachable; CameraQuest, its only American seller, never printed a number on any of its pages for the set or the lens.
Bessa R2S ICS (olive) Nikon S 2003–2003 — 25 olive bodies for the Tokyo Used Camera Show of 26 February – 3 March 2003 — but the wording covers the R2S and R2C together, where Japanese dealer copy attaches 国内限定25台 to each model separately.¹
Bessa R2C ICS (olive) Contax RF 2003–2003 — Counted inside the same 25 olive bodies as the R2S ICS: 25 across the two models on one reading, 25 of each on another.¹
  1. The olive ICS figures come from CameraQuest's description of the pair, in the same wording from 2003 through 2013.
How to tell them apart (expand)
  • One large combined viewfinder/rangefinder window dominates the front, giving both bodies a look reminiscent of the Nikon SP
  • A dual bayonet of the 1932 Contax pattern: an inner mount for the 50mm lens sitting inside the body's own focusing helicoid, an outer mount for everything else
  • A knurled focus wheel in front of the shutter release drives that helicoid, with two infinity-lock releases — one just inboard of the wheel, so that turning toward closer focus depresses it automatically, and a chrome knob beside the mount that releases downward. Fitting any lens other than a 50 pushes the lock's lug aside and disables it for good
  • Frame selector on the top plate, showing one frameline at a time, never a pair
  • Distance scale in metres only, never feet
  • Flat-head screws around the lens mount, as on the original Nikon and Contax bodies
  • 10mm deeper and 95g heavier than the M-mount Bessa R2 the pair were built from
  • Listing trap: the R2S is the Nikon mount and the R2C the Contax — transposed even in Shutterbug's review of the NHS set, which calls the R2S the Contax-mount version once in passing

Bessa R2S:

  • Top plate engraved R2S
  • Focusing helical and distance ring in black and chrome, Nikon SP style
  • Lens mount ring black
  • Apron around the mount in a semi-gloss finish, against the textured matte of the body
  • 0.9m engraved beside the lock spring, and visible
  • 1.3m sits exactly at the bottom of the distance scale

Bessa R2C:

  • Top plate engraved R2C
  • Focusing helical and distance ring all chrome
  • Lens mount ring silver, as on the original Contax
  • Apron around the mount in the same textured matte finish as the body
  • No 0.9m engraving — the position where it would fall is under the lock-spring screw
  • 1.3m sits slightly past the bottom of the distance scale
  • Helicoid extends visibly further than the R2S's

Bessa R2S Special Set for NHS:

  • Smooth piano-black front plate in place of the standard speckled black — the only visible difference on the camera itself
  • No NHS engraving anywhere, and no serial-number prefix
  • Box marked "Special Set for NHS"
  • Letter of authentication from Robert Rotoloni, founder of the Nikon Historical Society, tying the serial number to the series
  • Supplied with the rigid Nikon-mount S-Heliar 50mm f/3.5, which shares its optics with the collapsible Leica-mount Bessa T lens

Bessa R2S ICS (olive):

  • Olive paint in place of black
  • Engraved ICS for the Imported Camera Society

Bessa R2C ICS (olive):

  • Olive paint in place of black
  • Engraved ICS for the Imported Camera Society

Serial-range notes

0101xxx
Seven digits, no prefix and no letter. The only serials anyone has published from bodies in hand are one collector's own pair — an R2S and an R2C both reading 0101xxx, which led him to wonder whether the two models share a single running sequence rather than each having its own. Nobody has published a serial survey for either camera, and the individual numbers that circulate come from marketplace listings that can no longer be opened, so neither the block's extent nor its direction is established.

Specifications

Format
24×36mm
Finder
Combined real-image reverse-Galilean rangefinder/viewfinder, with projected brightlines · 0.7× magnification · 35mm, 50mm (orange), 85mm framelines · single · automatic parallax correction · 87% coverage
Shutter
Vertically-travelling metal focal plane, a modified Copal, entirely mechanical and needing no battery to fire; a second light-tight curtain behind it is the surface the meter reads · 1s–1/2000, B · flash sync X sync at 1/125 and slower, via hot shoe and PC terminal · no self-timer
Film advance
Ratcheted lever, so the stroke can be taken in parts, with the accessory trigger winder fitted as well as without it; double-exposure prevention and a shutter-button lock until the film is wound; rewind by button and folding crank, the button resetting itself on the next stroke
Back
Hinged, swinging open, with a film-confirmation window
Meter
TTL centre-weighted average at working aperture, read off the shutter curtain, displayed as three LEDs in a match-the-circle arrangement — a red circle flanked by + and − triangles. EV1 to EV19 at ISO 100, film speeds ISO 25–3200 in third stops, powered by two LR44 or SR44 cells. The meter holds for about twelve seconds on a light press, will not switch on at all until the film has been wound, and cuts out the instant the shutter fires
Motor drive
Not compatible — No motor drive and no factory winder-back was ever made. The camera does take the accessory Bessa Trigger Winder shared with the Bessa R2 and Bessa T, which needs no batteries, will manage about three frames a second, carries its own strap lugs for vertical use, and fits or comes off without unloading the film — the only factory trigger winder ever built for a Nikon or Contax rangefinder mount.
Weight
520 g
Dimensions
135.5 × 81.5 × 43.5 mm
Country
Japan
Original price
¥98,000 before tax in Japan (about ¥102,900 with the 5% consumption tax then in force); $625 in the United States at launch, $599 by 2005
Accessories
Bessa Trigger Winder — shared with the Bessa R2 and Bessa T, and the only factory trigger winder ever made for these mounts · Voigtländer SC body cap, which locks onto the bayonet like a lens and carries the scripted V · Voigtländer accessory shoe finders for 12, 15, 21, 25, 28, 35, 50, 75 and 90mm — the contemporary Voigtländer range rather than an S/C-specific list; no catalogue of accessories particular to these bodies has been found

Coupled from 0.9m to infinity, with 87% frame coverage quoted at 3m. Frames are switched by a lever on the top plate and only one is ever visible; the 50mm frame is orange precisely so that the change registers while the eye is still at the finder. There are no 105 or 135 frames, and Cosina rates the finder to lenses of the 85mm f/3.5–f/4 class. Cosina describes the same rangefinder two ways on one page — as a superimposed-image type in the specification row, and in the feature copy as separating the patch cleanly enough to be used as a vertical split image, which it claims is two to three times more precise. Both are true of the instrument; the split-image edge is a technique it permits, not a second rangefinder. The rangefinder also carries a mechanical stop, so it cannot be knocked out of alignment past infinity as the M-mount R2 could. Cosina has published no base length for this or any other Bessa, and the figures in circulation do not agree — see the disputed values below.

Figures we worked out rather than found: ¥102,900 — the tax-inclusive Japanese price, arithmetic on Cosina's ¥98,000 before tax at the 5% consumption tax in force in 2002; no dealer page carrying the figure is still reachable · The 10mm of depth, 95g and ¥20,000 the classic mount cost, computed against Cosina's own published figures for the M-mount Bessa R2 — 135.5 × 81 × 33.5mm, 425g, ¥78,000 · 36.6mm of base length in the third disputed figure, from Matt Osborne's effective 25.6mm divided by the 0.7× Cosina publishes; he gives no base length himself · 24.5mm of effective baselength in the fourth, from the photo.net contributor's 36mm at 0.68×; he gives no effective figure himself

Where sources disagree

finders.base_length_mm
38mm, effective about 27mm at 0.7× — Roger W. Hicks in Shutterbug, writing with an R2S in front of him vs 37mm, effective 25.9mm at 0.7× — the Japanese spec compendium クラカメGET, whose entry is for the 2007 Bessa R2M and which has no R2S or R2C entry at all vs Effective 25.6mm at 0.7×, implying 36.6mm of base — Matt Osborne, on an R2C; he gives no base length himself vs 36mm at 0.68× magnification, giving an effective 24.5mm — a photo.net contributor, and the only figure that contradicts the 0.7× Cosina itself publishes (Cosina published no base length for this or any other Bessa, so there is no manufacturer figure to arbitrate between these. Hicks is the only writer of the four measuring against an actual R2S. Nothing establishes that the R2S/R2C rangefinder base is physically the R2's or the R2M's either: the front is restyled around a single large window, the body is 10mm deeper, and the frameline set is 35/50/85 where the R2 and R2M carry 35/50/75/90.)
meter
About 12 seconds of meter hold — Cosina, in its feature copy and its specification table alike vs About 15 seconds after the release is let go — Stephen Gandy, describing a camera in hand (The manufacturer states its figure twice and consistently; the distributor was holding the camera.)

What reviewers say

History

At Photokina in September 2002 Cosina announced that it would build its M-mount Bessa R2 twice more: once in Nikon rangefinder mount as the Bessa R2S, once in the Zeiss Contax rangefinder mount of 1932 as the Bessa R2C. Both mounts were long dead — the last regular-production Contax rangefinder was discontinued in 1962, Nikon’s in 1965 — and nobody had built a body for either since. What went on sale in Japan that November at ¥98,000 before tax was, on Cosina’s own specification table and on the distributor’s checkable list of firsts, the first camera in either mount with TTL metering, the first with a 1/2000 top speed, the first to sync flash at 1/125, and the first whose back simply swung open on a hinge with a window to confirm there was film behind it. The R2C remains the only TTL-metered camera ever made in classic Contax mount, of any make. And the reason both exist is entirely commercial: Cosina wanted to sell modern Voigtländer lenses into two abandoned mounts, and lenses need bodies to go on.

Re-flanging an R2 was not an option, because the 1932 Contax bayonet is not really a lens mount at all. It is two mounts, one inside the other, and it puts the standard lens’s focusing helicoid inside the camera rather than in the lens. Cosina had to reproduce all of it: an in-body helicoid running 0.9m to infinity, an inner bayonet for the 50 sitting within it and an outer bayonet outside it for everything else, a knurled focus wheel in front of the shutter release to drive the helicoid, and two separate infinity-lock releases — one placed just inboard of the wheel so that a finger turning toward close focus depresses it without thinking, and a chrome stud beside the mount that releases downward. Fit any lens other than a 50 and a small lug at ten o’clock on the mount is pushed aside by the outer bayonet’s collar, disabling the lock permanently. The wheel is for 50mm and shorter only: Gandy’s warning is blunt, that the mechanism is not strong enough to turn an 85 and that you will likely damage the camera trying. All of this cost 10mm of depth, 95g and ¥20,000 over the M-mount R2 it came from. What went in alongside it was ordinary Bessa engineering used well: a modified Copal shutter running to 1/2000 with no battery needed to fire it, a second light-tight curtain behind the first that gives the meter a surface to read, a ratcheted advance that will take its stroke in pieces, and a finder that switches one brightline at a time between 35, 50 and 85 with the 50mm frame in orange so the change registers while your eye is still to the glass. There is no self-timer and no provision for multiple exposures. Some lenses will not go on at all — the prewar Jena 35mm f/2.8 Biogon fouls on its rear element, the Nikkor 21mm f/4 will not mount, and the 21mm f/4.5 Biogon needs two screws out and its rear collar removed, a part almost impossible to replace if you lose it.

The reason there are two cameras rather than one is the most interesting thing about them, and it is not settled. Nikon copied the Contax bayonet in 1946 and changed something, with the result that Nikon and Contax lenses of 50mm and up will mount on each other’s bodies and agree at infinity but drift apart as you focus closer. What changed is disputed. The received account is a difference in standard focal length — Karen Nakamura gives Nikon 51.6mm against Contax’s 52.3mm, and Gandy describes the two mounts as simply having different amounts of helical travel. Henry Scherer, who repairs these cameras for a living, denies the focal-length story outright, says neither company ever made such a statement, and locates the whole difference in flange depth: 26.51mm on the Nikon against 26.82mm on the Contax, a 0.31mm offset at identical thread pitch. The two accounts contradict each other head-on, since Gandy states that the mounts have the same back focus and Scherer’s measurement is that they do not. What can be said against the flange-depth explanation is that a fixed offset at identical pitch would put focus out by a constant amount at every distance, whereas everyone who has used these bodies describes an error that starts at zero and grows — the signature of differing helicoid travel. The R2S and R2C are the only place that divergence can be seen as hardware rather than argued from figures, and a Japanese collector who set his own two side by side found exactly what the travel account predicts: the Contax body’s helicoid extends further, 1.3m sits at the very bottom of the R2S’s scale but slightly past it on the R2C, and the 0.9m figure engraved beside the lock spring on the Nikon body falls under a screw on the Contax one and is therefore left off entirely.

Two things about the reception are worth keeping straight. The first is that the line repeated everywhere — the first new cameras in these mounts in forty years — needs its original qualifier back. Gandy wrote “first regular production cameras,” and that survives, but Nikon had already reissued the S3 as the Year 2000 Millennium model in October 2000, about 8,000 of them, with an S3 Limited Edition Black following in June 2002, 2,000 more, months before Photokina; a black SP followed in 2005. Those were limited commemoratives, so the careful version of the claim holds and the flat version does not. The second is that they did not sell. Cosina stopped production in April 2005 and turned back to Leica-mount rangefinders, and what it built in the meantime has left a strangely one-sided record: the cameras were properly documented in Japan and barely at all in English. 写真工業 ran a first-look in October 2002 and then, that November, a six-page technical report written by Cosina’s own sales and development division inside a special feature on the revived Contax and Nikon RF mounts; Futabasha published a 136-page mook devoted to nothing but these two cameras the same month. None of the three has been digitised, and the technical report — the manufacturer explaining its own mounts — is very likely the best surviving account of how the thing was engineered and the likeliest place a base length was ever printed. Cosina printed one nowhere a reader can now check: the number collectors most want from a rangefinder is absent from the specification table and from the archive sheet alike, and the four figures that circulate in its place disagree with each other, one of them not even about this camera. Production totals are no better: Cosina has never published one for either body, no serial survey exists for either, and the only serials anyone has recorded from cameras in hand are one collector’s own pair.

The special editions are where the record gets genuinely tangled, and one of them is a camera that appears never to have been made. In January 2003 CameraQuest put up a page announcing that it and the Nikon Historical Society were planning a commemorative R2S whose first listed feature was an engraved NHS logo, at an estimated $825 to $875, with a certificate signed by the Society’s founder Robert Rotoloni and an offer to existing owners to send their bodies back for the engraving. The page was last revised that November and then frozen — it still says that frankly, all details have not been worked out yet — and no engraved NHS body has ever surfaced in a listing, an auction or a review. What actually shipped, two years later, was a quieter object: the 2005 Special Set for NHS, an R2S whose only visible difference from a standard body is a smooth piano-black front plate in place of the usual speckled paint, packed with the rigid Nikon-mount S-Heliar 50mm f/3.5 and sold at $999 against $599 for a plain R2S at that moment, part of the price going to the Society. There is no engraving on it and not even a serial prefix; you identify one by its box, by Rotoloni’s letter tying a specific serial to the series, and by the lens. The rarer editions came earlier: 25 olive bodies engraved ICS for the Imported Camera Society, sold at the Tokyo Used Camera Show that ran 26 February to 3 March 2003. Whether 25 means 25 across both models or 25 of each is a question the surviving sources answer differently, and the Society’s own founding in 1972 puts its thirtieth anniversary a year before the show at which the cameras appeared, which nobody explains. The NHS set was the last thing Cosina built in the S mount, and it went out with a lens Hicks called one of the sharpest 50mm lenses ever made.

Expand Collapse

This history is AI-written, from the sources listed at the foot of the page. Where the record is silent it says so rather than filling the gap — but no human wrote these sentences.

Example photos

Sample photo wanted — shot with a Bessa R2S / R2C? We'd love to feature it (with credit).

Live listings

The listings collector hasn't run for this family yet — check back soon, or search the marketplaces directly meanwhile.

Related: Nikon SP

Lenses for this body: S Heliar 50mm f/3.5 · S APO-Lanthar 85mm f/3.5 · S Skopar 50mm f/2.5 · SC-Skopar 21mm f/4 · SC-Skopar 25mm f/4 · SC-Skopar 28mm f/3.5 · SC-Skopar 35mm f/2.5

Sources (31)

Every page here is assembled from public sources, and the gaps are real ones. If you own this camera, know a serial number we are missing, or can see where we have it wrong, we want to hear it. A submissions address is coming; until then, corrections, serials and sample photos are all worth holding onto.