Good Russian Cameras?

My first proper camera was a Zorki 4 back in '68. Loved it, mainly because it was all I could afford.Recently bought a 4K for nostalgia reasons and a silly price,probably the same as the Zorki 4 cost in '68. I,ve been using my Nikon f2a but am going to put a film through the Zorki now.

Huss said:

I just ordered an Agat 18K. Could not resist. Would have ordered it 'locally' from Fedka, but he wants $25 to ship via USPS priority mail, which for a package that size is something like $8 including the free box...

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The solar flares are spectacular. The lens is a quaint little fellow, and a capable one, too. Flare-prone, yes, but that's just what I like about it

There have been some very interesting looking cameras mentioned in this thread.
I have probably never seen one in person, but it has been fun to see them here.!

I bought a job lot of enlarging gear this week and included was a cosmic35, Straight in the bin.

Leppy said:

I bought a job lot of enlarging gear this week and included was a cosmic35, Straight in the bin.

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Why didn't you donate it to a local charity shop?

Captain Mainwaring said:

The solar flares are spectacular. The lens is a quaint little fellow, and a capable one, too. Flare-prone, yes, but that's just what I like about it

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I'm looking forward to that! I have plenty of 'perfect' lenses and cameras.

Huss said:

Why didn't you donate it to a local charity shop?

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Couldn't get the shutter to work. It'd cock but the linkage wouldn't release the shutter.

Leppy said:

I bought a job lot of enlarging gear this week and included was a cosmic35, Straight in the bin.

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What kind of enlarging stuff did you get.?

CMoore said:

What kind of enlarging stuff did you get.?

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Durst m370 b/w,and beta 2 (Gnome?) enlargers, 4 x 50mm lenses, nikkor/wray, 2 unopened boxes 7x5 ilforspeed rc grades2&3, 2 pretty full boxes 10x8 ilfospeed gds 2&3,,100 shts in each.,6 bulbs, 2 trays, safelight,and an unused box of Retouch Methods 14 retouching colours.All for the princely sum of £30

Leppy said:

Durst m370 b/w,and beta 2 (Gnome?) enlargers, 4 x 50mm lenses, nikkor/wray, 2 unopened boxes 7x5 ilforspeed rc grades2&3, 2 pretty full boxes 10x8 ilfospeed gds 2&3,,100 shts in each.,6 bulbs, 2 trays, safelight,and an unused box of Retouch Methods 14 retouching colours.All for the princely sum of £30

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Oh, and an LPL 16 x 12 printing frame.

Leppy said:

Durst m370 b/w,and beta 2 (Gnome?) enlargers, 4 x 50mm lenses, nikkor/wray, 2 unopened boxes 7x5 ilforspeed rc grades2&3, 2 pretty full boxes 10x8 ilfospeed gds 2&3,,100 shts in each.,6 bulbs, 2 trays, safelight,and an unused box of Retouch Methods 14 retouching colours.All for the princely sum of £30

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Oh Man...you got a lot of stuff for a great price.

CMoore said:

Oh Man...you got a lot of stuff for a great price.

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Read this and weep, about 5 yrs ago. Out of date paper, bromesko, kodabrom, ilfospeed,40 boxes 10x8,26 boxes w/plate,16 boxes 7x5 and postcard.All unopened, all 100 sheets.Odd packs up to 20 x 16, 30m x 1.05m roll kodak mural, box 50 half plate fp4, same hp4. 9 boxes x50 sheets kodalith 2556 1/8 plate, box 50 kodalith 6556 8 x 10,10 rolls 35mm 36 exp, 26 rolls 120 film,some other bits as well .Almost embarrassed to say this £40. A box of oddments for £10, in it a Linhof film winder and a nikon f2 body and finder.. Needless to say I made a hasty exit.

OK......now you are just gloating.

Good russian cameras? That is a contradiction in terms.

cliveh said:

Good russian cameras? That is a contradiction in terms.

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They were made for millions of comrades who were all equal, not for a few affluent capitalists.

'Good Russian Cameras' is a bit of an oxymoron, like 'Good Russian Employees'; they're bound to fail and betray you

With Russia's reputation for spying etc I,m surprised that they never fitted their cameras with tracking devices, but it would be unthinkable that any country or company would do such a thing, or even that people would knowingly carry such things around.

The quality control may vary between countries, in the UK we had the distributor Technical and Optical Equipment check out at least the Zenits, not sure about the rangefinders.
I must have owned about a dozen , only two could not be easily fixed. For the RFs, the Industar lenses are 4 element and good contrast, the Jupiter 8 is 6 elements and has higher resolution
The one that looks the part and has a reasonable viewfinder is IMO the Zorki 6 rangefinder. All the RFs are appreciating in value quite nicely, the same cannot be said for the Zenits.
The history of the early FEDs is interesting, they are collectors items now..

All you want to know about Soviet cameras but were afraid to ask.

https://kosmofoto.com/2021/01/read-this-before-you-buy-a-soviet-camera/

It is a long read but worth it, I think.(and not every model covered)

BMbikerider said:

One of the other ones I owned was called 'Start' which is a translation of the Russian Cyrillic letters of the name below the prism. It was a cross between a Zenith B but with a bayonet mount for the lens. and an early Exacta. It had the common Russian F2/58mm Zeiss Biotar copy and the same back to front wind on lever, There was a film cutting blade . An auto aperture plunger which was also the shutter release button plus a removable prism. It came with a bayonet to 39mm thread adapter to take 'T' mount lenses. If you think an F4 is heavy get hold of one of these beasts To call it crude and clunky is a kind description, but saying that it never let me down. I sold it to help me buy a Pentax SV.

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after years using Spotmatic and a bit of Yashica my regular 35mm SLR for when I shoot that format, are the KMZ Start and the Zenit-V. In 35 RF a 1953 Zorki.
None of these three cameras have ever caused me problems.
I think I mentioned the Start in one or two thread. I have 3 of them, because I routinely spend my week-ends in Russia (pre covid times...) and when I see a good camera in the 2nd hand market I pick it, this was the case with my Starts and others.

"crude and clunky" is quite exaggerated. Rewind lever is very basic, crude and prone to bend and crack, that's all. The camera is otherwise well finished.
It's a Zenit derivative without Exakta influence excepted the film knife, receiving cartridge and removable prism/chimney.
Mechanically the shutter is the one of the Zorki-4 but with a different layout, due to the mirror cage and prism.
I have few Start-ZM39 adapters so I use it often with the Mir-1 in M39 and different incarnations of the Helios-44, and the portrait Jupiters. But I have also DIY Tamron Adaptall adapter and DIY M39 version of the Mir-20.

Here my main Start besides a Ricoh Singlex. These Ricoh were the bigger japaneses at the time Olympus and Yashica made very small compact ones. The Start is just a bit chunkier and of course a 50's look instead of the 70's Ricoh look, but well the look doesn't matter to me.
Here the Start has a Tamron SP 28-80mm zoom with my custom Adaptall converter, the Ricoh has a Zenitar-M.



I take the Start when I need slow speeds and the 1/1000s, otherwise I use the Zenit-V.

the beauty of the Start is indeed the film knife and receiving cartridge (but it can take just a regular receiving spool). I rarely shoot a whole 24x or 36x roll, but often 8 to 12 frames with some emulsion, cut , remove the cartridge, load another emulsion, etc. I also roll BW from bulk and some cine color film.

The viewfinder of the Start is also very good, over 90%, very clear and a big split circle, the split could better be 45 instead of horizontal, but as is already quite good:




this camera is an unknown gem.
Whatever, facts are that i picked these second hand directly from the seller or from a 2nd hand shop like the one in Novoya Basmannaya str in Moskow or Photolubitel in SPb, and they HAD NO ISSUES. Just a damn fact.


My other 35 SLR user is a slightly tweaked Zenit-V, I did a custom rewind lever from the one of the Zenit-3M, added strap lugs, put an iso reminder wheel instead of the color/bw metalic wheel. Very basic classical 5-speeds Zorki-Zenit shutter, can't go wrong:




I have also used extensively a Moskva-5, simple, reliable, 6x6 or 6x9, pocketable. Only drawback prone to some softness before f8.

My Zorki 1953 just keeps going and going. I was careful when buying it, take care of it, that's all.

Even my 1960's Salyuts ( I have two) shot roll after roll. Only maintenance: they need some curtain retensioning somewhere between the 50th and 100th roll (haven't kept excat count), but this is easy to do.

I have a Kiev-2 who did suffer from curtain stuck, which was easy to fix, with precaution.
the Kiev-10 is nice for the range of speeds (1/2 to 1/1000) but is chunky and heavy. I removed the worn selenium plate and the solenoid for automatic diaphgram setup, so use in pure manual mode. Have too a M39 adapter for it.

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back to OP question, soviet cameras with ergonomic lightmetering are not the cuttiest old-look ones, but the Zenit 12xp/sd and the Zenit-122. Alternatively a Kiev-15 (checked/serviced of course).

There's a simple, basic, automatic CdS metered RF, the Sokol, many of them nowadays have non-working circuitry and if it works it takes no more than 250 iso. I use mine in manual mode anyway as I do always external metering. 5-speeds, a parallalax corrected viewfinder with nice RF spot. They all suffer at some time from a RF glass loosening because weak glue, but it's an easy fix. Lens Industar-70 is ok and can be good.

Just come across an interesting article in 2009 BJP mag on Russian cameras. Fed was named after Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Russian secret service. Also states the selling price in the UK of the Zorki 4 was about £12, but in Russia about £250. Looking in a 1968 copy of amateur photographer you could buy a used Leica 111a for about £30.

Leppy said:

With Russia's reputation for spying etc I,m surprised that they never fitted their cameras with tracking devices, but it would be unthinkable that any country or company would do such a thing, or even that people would knowingly carry such things around.

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The only spy I know today are microsoft and google. And we own and carry such things around.

Let's take the Zenit for for example. When you look through the viewfinder, you can look round the pentaprism (thus distracting from the view) and when you wind on, it sounds like two house bricks rubbing together. Not exactly precision engineering.

Just shot a roll through my Horizon 202 panoramic camera. This is a super camera, Russian or not, better than the glorified Widelux F7 and F8 that I used to have, in ways better than my fancy German Noblex 135 Sport.

Leppy said:

Just come across an interesting article in 2009 BJP mag on Russian cameras. Fed was named after Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Russian secret service. Also states the selling price in the UK of the Zorki 4 was about £12, but in Russia about £250. Looking in a 1968 copy of amateur photographer you could buy a used Leica 111a for about £30.

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prices comparisons are a difficult exercise because soviet ruble was a domestic currency for internal use, the front-end with open market currencies was an import/export trade for the state but didn't translate into the intrinsics of soviet society, very different of regular capitalist society.
A typical measure was to talk in portions of or amounts of monthly salary.
There was a long thread on club.foto.ru about the cost of cameras in the 80's mostly (well, beginnig of the thread before it diverts...): for instance Zenit-E 100rb, salary 150 rb. etc:

Что сколько стоило в Советское Время...

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Fed was named after Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Russian secret service.

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well, I believed this was the first known trivial fact about the FED... All literature and online sites do remind of this but few do detail a bit further.

there's also a lot of fuzziness in the terms. It was not the russian secret service but the soviet counter-revolutionary service and secret service, Tcheka then OGPU then NKVD then KGB. Agents affected to counter-revolutionary service had specific uniforms, so they were clearly differentiated from the police and from the military. The ones affected to intelligence activity were of course just regular civilians.

Dzerzhinsky was a Polak from the polish-lithuanian eastern-most realm, his birth place is nowadays in Belarus. In polish registries of the catholic church he was under his polish name Feliks Szczęsny.
Many early Bolsheviks were Polaks and from the edges of Austro-Hungarian empire. As well known marxism and modern forms of socialism and communism did develop initially in Germany (Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels...) and propagated into Russian Empire eastwards through Poland and Austria. Karl Radek was from Lwow, Lemberg in german, Rosa Luxemburg from a town between Lublin and Lwow. Etc. Other Polaks as important as Dzerzhinsky in the forming of initial soviet state were Julian Leszczyński and Bronisław Wesołowski. Dzerzhinsky/Szczęsny was active in the polish communist party also.

ok, so the origin of the FED camera is indeed very unusual because it was not from a manufacturer of photographic material. Russian Empire had experienced ten years of war: from 1914 WWI to the end of Civil War around 1923/1924. WWI alone inflicted terrific effects in the country, hence the first february revolution out of social unrest. By beginning 1920's there was a huge amount of orphans and street children. The fresh soviet government was concerned by that of course, and specially Dzerzhinsky. He coordinated measures in order to re-socialize street children and teenagers, end related homelessness , criminality. On the other hand there was a famous pedagogue, Anton Makarov who had experimented with self-sufficient self-managed boarding organizations ie. "communes" with a combined work and educational task. Makarov had also been in contact with Gorki who was a drifter in his harsh youth.

one of this "communes" was founded in Kharkov by Makarov in honor to Dzerzhinsky. There were of course technical personal and supervising engineers. Kids , from early teenagers to youngers in their twenties first producing simple metallurgic objects like bed knobs and oil cans, then moved into manufacture of drills. Workshops improved and tooled as needed. The institution became also a vocational school. Then, once a Leica was brought from Germany, disassembled, and they started making clones, with some slight variations.
it was all hand made until 1935, with lenses individually adjusted to the bodies.

these early hand-made FED, numbered on top plate, with the inscription "Trudkommuna in the name of F.E.Dzerzhinsky" first, then "Trudkommuna NKVD-USSR etc" can be quite expensive. (trud kommuna = work commune). WW2 did suspend production but some batches for the military and these had a 1/1000 speed and are nicknamed "kommandirsky".
After 1935 the marking "Trudkommuna" is replaced with "factory" then "kombinat", as the "commune" was shut down and became a regular factory.

a Trudkommuna NKVD-USSR with the 1/1000s (from an a listing on Avito):