Zenit (camera)

Zenit (Russian: Зени́т) is a Soviet camera brand manufactured by KMZ in the town of Krasnogorsk near Moscow since 1952 and by BelOMO in Belarus since the 1970s.

For an SLR, the Pentaprism of all classical Zenits was undersize, with the viewfinder showing about two-thirds of the actual frame-size.

On the Zenit-S the mirror setting lever mechanism of the original Zenit was replaced by a cord and pulley system.

During 1967 through 1969 KMZ built an automatic die-cast moulding line, allowing mass camera production.

This camera had a full set of shutter speeds (from 1 sec to 1/1000), a lens with an automatic diaphragm in a unique breech-lock mount, and even a knife for cutting-off part of the unexposed film.

With the success of the Zeiss-Ikon Contaflex of the mid-1950s and its follow-ups in form of the Bessamatic, Retina- and Paxette-reflex, Zenit's next attempt was the Zenit-4 (1964), -5 and -6 cameras.

The poor durability and high manufacturing cost of this concept in contrast to the classical barebone Zenit design based on ultimate simplicity showed KMZ to have taken a wrong track: Nevertheless, the Zenit-5 was the first electric motor-driven SLR camera in the world, and the first Soviet zoom lens (Rubin-1c 2.8/37–80, based on Voigtländer Zoomar design) featured in the Zenit-6.

The Zenit 12-XP With its Helios f2/58mm lens and cloth shutter was widely sold by US Eastern camera stores.

The camera has only manual shooting mode (with a TTL-meter and a needle indicator of the proper exposition in the viewfinder).

X-sync is 1/125 sec, and the camera includes both manual shutter and aperture-priority modes as well as DX-coding from 50 to 3200 ISO.

However, they appeared at a time when their market-segment was saturated with second-hand equipment, so no major importer looked at them[citation needed].

The 20-year overdue replacement of the external selenium cell of the Zenit E by TTL-metering is said to be the work of an employee who made a conversion on his own accord.

In the West, the success of the Zenit line can be focused on the United Kingdom, primarily due to the marketing activity and service of TOE, and secondly the originally heavy UK tax-load of up to two-thirds on imported precision cameras.

TOE were fighting a constant battle with their USSR-suppliers in this direction, having to fill the gap left by the excellent but not-for-export Soviet lenses which would have been a major selling-point, by a hodge-podge selection of second-rate mass-market optics from Japan, albeit under the "Helios" label.

The original Zenit came with the sturdy click-stop four-element 3.5/50mm Zeiss Tessar copy under the "Industar" designation.

Early aluminium variants made in several different bodies were finely blue-coated, whereas the later mass-produced black version was either partially or un-coated with no visible colour on the glass.

The concept of the makers was to offer a sharp Tessar-type lens of the simplest possible body construction, leaving out all progress made in this field since 1945.

Bottom Loading Hinged Back List of Zenit DKL-mount ("Байонет Ц") lenses: Source[3] One oddity of the Zenit camera range is the so-called FotoSnaiper (or Photosniper) kit, which consists of a case (either leather or metal) a gunstock and shoulderstock, filters, a 300 mm f4.5 Tair-3 lens, a normal lens and a Zenit adapted for the gunstock (recognizable by the s designation, Zenit-ES, 122s etc.).

[4][5] The digital Zenit M camera was released in a limited edition set with the Zenitar-M 35mm F/1.0 lens.