I have two of these finders. I agree that they are actually quite good. I use them on my Zeiss Contax rangefinders and my Kiev and Fed rangefinders. The finders are surprisingly affordable. They are modeled on the Zeiss turret, which runs around $300-400. I paid around $50-60 for the KMZ finder. I can't imagine the quality is that much different that it would affect the photographs. BTW, they look really really cool on a Contax rangefinder.
I have two of these, they come in left and right handed versions. One is suited to Leica/Zorki/Fed style and the other to Contax/Kiev style ones. My Soviet cameras are in store at the moment, but from memory I think it’s the left hand one which fits the Zorki and something gets in the way of the right hand one. Again from memory, I think either will fit the Contax/Kiev camera but I think it’s the right hand one which works best. Not only are the finders handed, but so to are the Bakelite boxes they come in. One style turns up on EBay more often than the other.
About framelines in soviet camera rangefinders - some of it had lines for 85 mm lenses - "Droog" and "Leningrad" (both - LTM), "Kiev-5" (Contax external mount). But all of these models occured to be extremely unreliable, so they went a limited production (except for "Leningrad") and today are more collectible than usable.
50mm viewfinder is quite useful. Imagine Zorki 1 with its tiny viewfinder, and jupiter 8, which covers the view a little bit. Now imagine jupiter 8 with sun hood. You loose half of the view in the camera viewfinder.
Hi Brian, these turrets are great. Use one with my Zorki's and Kiev's, 50 and 35mm lenses. AFAIK the reason for having a 5cm view is you only end up dealing with slight vertical parallax and not the horizontal parallax from the rangefinder window which these cameras don't correct for.
I had one of these but it fits loose on the flash foot. so it plays left and right and image changes with it, perhaps and older model. Anyone knows how to fix it?
This paper (pass) belongs to another piece of soviet equipment, which is made in 1988 Jupiter-12 35 mm lens = ) According to another, interesting to watch, video from your channel, Jupiter-12 lens i saw does not comes with this pass. White copies were made in KMZ ("Z", by the way, stands for zavod (manufactory) way before 1988. Late 80s copies from another factory (zavod) are black. PS: Whites are better)
I was suspicious about that pass in the turret viewfinder container as the serial number didn't match. Thank you for clearing that up. Is it true that, as a general rule, the white Jupiter lenses are better than the later black ones?
@@BriansPhotoShow According to soviet made rangefinder shooters (geeks =)), yes) Well, there is many legends about that. One of the most popular says that early production was based on german steel, glass and machines. For example, Jupiter - 9 of yours is early one, probably, from 50s or 60s and made on KMZ factory. These things makes it better automatically. PS: what i know for sure, that quality of every single piece of equipment is different and up to many reasons. Every soviet production had 5 year plan for everything and than closer it was to deadline than worse everything was made)) opposite is correct also.
Just to clarify, the one seen here I would call left handed, as from the viewpoint of the photographer the body of the turret is offset to the left of the mounting foot. Both of mine work well.
I had one of those bakelikte 35mm finders. I cracked and broke the foot trying to remove it from my Fed 2, it was jammed in there so tight. Maybe the bakelite swells over time or something.
