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Before you buy a Soviet Camera

kosmofoto.com

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Re: Before you buy a Soviet Camera

#3

Post by Wildgoose »

I still have my Fed-4L rangefinder, (which was closely modelled on a Leica). It was my first proper camera as teenager in the late 1970s and it was just fabulous.

I was never happy with switching to SLR and I now use a Fuji X-Pro1 which brought back the love of photography that my wonderful affordable Fed-4L first instilled in me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FED_(camera)

Re: Before you buy a Soviet Camera

#7

Post by prionassembly »

I have a few soviet cameras. What stands out the most is their sheer heft.

I have a Fed-4, a Fed-5, a Lubitel and three original, marked-in-cyrillic Lomo LC-As (not the clone Lomography Inc. marketed later). When I was doing film photography I also used to have a Diana (shitty but on purpose Chinese 120/medium-format camera) and a (mystery Russian beyond my ability to read Cyrillic) medium-format camera that needed a tripod out of how heavy it was. Finally, I had a consumer-grade Canon.

The Feds weighed like double what the Canon packed with two extra lenses did. LC-As are not that heavy, but the front-panel is finicky and I feel pained to put the thing in a backpack. As it turns out, the cameras I take out the most are (Chinese) Vivitar Ultra-Wide and Slim and the unmarked fixed-focus camera my family usedwhen I was a child.

Before you buy a Soviet camera: these things are heavy!

Edit: reading the comments I remembered another two: an Agat half-frame camera and another one I-can't-read-the cyrllic-from half-frame that has a huge thick light sensor around the lens and so it has auto-exposure. The former is plastic and not too heavy (but the exposure controls are hard to use, and because it's a half-frame it can't be as forgiving as the wide-aperture lenses in fixed-focus cameras). The latter is heavier than my laptop, I think!

Re: Before you buy a Soviet Camera

#8

Post by dhosek »

maurits wrote: post #2

Old soviet lenses, like the helios, can be lots of fun and fit relatively easily on a mirrorless camera. The Chinese Holga is also a magnificent piece of plastic. See Mathieu Stern for inspiration. [1] [1]: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYX22a35sKhA0T6ee7uZfvg

I've got a Holga that I won in a raffle when my wife was in the photography program at Santa Monica College. One of these days I'm gonna track down some film for it and actually take some pictures (and then find somewhere I can get the film developed).

Re: Before you buy a Soviet Camera

#9

Post by rob74 »

“There were several cameras I bought, boxed and with factory seals and signed certificates of worthiness, and yet when opened revealed a camera which could never work,” says Javier.

Next paragraph: "Why did the myth about the low quality of Soviet cameras appear?"

Errr... am I missing something here? Sounds pretty obvious to me?

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