I've had a Fed 2 rangefinder with a 50mm Industar lens I bought in Russia 10 years ago, I still use it from time to time. It's been a great camera, but film's getting too expensive to develop. I recently put the lens on a mirrorless Sony. Aside from the lack of auto-focus/aperture it's a still solid.
Before you buy a Soviet Camera
11–20 of 69 posts
Re: Before you buy a Soviet Camera
#12“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?
It's mentioned in the Zenit-E review[0]:
"Most Soviet camera designs were perfectly sound – it was more often that the construction itself was lacking. TOE engineers learned on the assembly line, then went back to the UK and stripped and reassembled every single camera that came into the UK."
I grew up in Poland and my dad said the exact same thing - that when he was young, if you managed to somehow buy yourself a brand new Soviet motocrycle, fresh from the factory, the very first thing you did was disassemble the whole thing to bits, lubricate, and reassemble everything at correct torques and in correct places. Then you could go and safely use it.
[0]https://kosmofoto.com/2018/12/zenit-e-russian-camera-review/
Re: Before you buy a Soviet Camera
#13[deleted]
Re: Before you buy a Soviet Camera
#14One thing to remember when buying such a camera is to avoid those which were built in haste so as to fulfil the production plan for a given period - usually a month.
The serial number often indicates the date of production as well.
Re: Before you buy a Soviet Camera
#15I fell down the Soviet photography rabbit hole, and it's so much fun. You can just experiment with different lenses, cameras, and focal lengths for a fraction of the cost, and usually without sacrificing much quality. I picked up a Zorki 1 off Ebay for peanuts, and it works perfectly. It's small, has a collapsable lens, and just lives in my jacket pocket all the time. It's quite heavy, and every control has a very satisfying mechanical feeling. You can also pick up lens adapters (usually m39 for rangefinder, and m42 for SLR) to use Soviet glass on modern mirrorless cameras. The Helios 44-2 is a really really good lens for the price, and is a great companion to my Sony A6000
Re: Before you buy a Soviet Camera
#16no mention of the krasnogorsk k-3! one of the cheapest and most popular 16mm non sync movie cameras around...
Re: Before you buy a Soviet Camera
#17>Odd, then, that the entirety of a photographic industry spread across the largest country ever formed and spanning more than 60 years can get judged off first impressions.
A lot of people come judge anything out of the Soviet Union off that first word.
Re: Before you buy a Soviet Camera
#18> Soviet factories built their cameras to a different philosophy to those in the West. If a West German or Japanese camera model proved unpopular, the plug was pulled. In the USSR, a factory might be told to build 250,000 of one design over the next five years, and until they were told different, that’s what they did.
...
> “But when the manufacturing started things often went wrong. FED, Arsenal, BelOMO, other factories, had to crank out hundreds of thousands of cameras and lenses, and their quantity, not quality, were the only thing that counted. To meet a quota factories could substitute brass parts for aluminium, skip calibration steps to speed up assembly – the list goes on.”
Re: Before you buy a Soviet Camera
#19I used to own the infamous Kiev 88 TTL with a range of lenses, and while I loved the knock-off design and heft, the build quality was disastrous. The film cassettes leaked light which ruined some films, the transport would jam, and the shutter as well.
I've never been too fond of the softness of the 35mm's, the 120 photos were just that much better. But then digital happened and both lenses and sensors outgrew anything analog.
Re: Before you buy a Soviet Camera
#20I've got a Zorki 4 rangefinder (works well), a Kiev-6C (variable frame spacing, loud AF), a Moskva 5 (Rube Goldberg-inspired rangefinder but otherwise okay), a Lubitel 166U (what's "edge sharpness"?), and now a Zenit-19M (Nikon mount, solid, reputation for wildly inaccurate metering). They're not finely-crafted machines, but if you get one that works they do fine for cameras built 40+ years ago.