A short history of Soviet cameras FED ZORKI KIEV

 In the USSR, in the postwar years, the government decided to produce sophisticated equipment and camera. Mass production of Soviet photo equipment began back in 1929. These were cameras of the Fotokor 1 brand, which, as should be noted, were masterfully made following the example of their German colleagues - the Zeiss Icons apparatus.

      One of the most successful photographic inventions of the Soviet Union was the Zenit camera, which production lasted from 1952 to 2005. Its camera family has been sold over fifteen million copies and exported to Western Europe. The most remarkable thing is that almost all the models of this brand are still in operation.

      The predecessors of Zenit were the Moskva and Zorky cameras, which mass production began in 1946 and 1948 accordingly. "Moskva" was a complete copy of the German camera "Zeiss Super Ikonta C 6 × 9 Folder", which underwent 5 improvements and got a rangefinder and focusing by the ground glass. In all models, the shutter operated at speeds from 1 to 1/250s + B. The Zorky camera was equipped with an Industar-50 glass, the shutter speed was from 1/25 to 1/500s + B, and had a removable lens. Models of the brand had improvements after what got shutter speeds of 1, 1/2, 1/5, 1/10, and 1/1000. The following models became semi-automatic and with smaller size.

      In the period from the 30s to the 60s, many models appeared among which were the cameras "Start", "Iskra", "Horizont", "Smena", "Lubitel", "Sputnik", "FED", " Kiev "," Moskva "and others.

      The most interesting and popular models released in the USSR are Zorky, Smena, Kiev, Zenit, and FED cameras.

      The Smena camera was simple and affordable and was one of the most common for beginning photographers. "Kiev" is a small-format rangefinder camera, which was produced at the "Arsenal" Kyiv factory. Its first models were an exact copy of the German Contax camera. The FED camera was produced at the Kharkiv Engineering Plant “FED” and holds the record for the number of Soviet cameras produced - more than 750 million units.

      Today the volume of film photography is growing faster and more often you can find people with old Soviet Union cameras. The Soviet DSLR camera has big advantages: it does not require charging, it is lightweight and durable. Nonetheless, the USSR camera market is not that small. Even despite the fact that most of the cameras were borrowed from German photography development, it remains one of the main favorites among admirers of photography art to this day.