Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1996/10/09
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]At 05:22 PM 10/9/96 -0400, Charles E Love, Jr, wrote: >Still, Bob seems to me to be fairly undiscriminating--he LOVES Russian stuff, and >even at its best those Kievs are surely (relative to what else is available >in medium format) bad products. Well, Mr Love, there has NEVER been a Russian Kiev camera -- they're Ukrainian. Second, the cameras are not all that awful, they're merely quite uneven in quality control and the bad ones are QUITE bad, though the good ones are, equally, quite good. Third, the Kiev MF cameras have lenses which are clones of either Zeiss Oberkochen or of Zeiss Jena glass -- superlative lenses. Fourth, the entry price on these systems is rather low: you can buy an '88, two backs, and a couple of lenses with the meter-prism for what you pay for a fair middlin' old Rolleiflex. I shoot Hassie and Rollei and a Super Ikonta in MF: but I have had a bunch of Kiev cameras and would be still, if I hadn't swapped my last one even for a Hassie. I DID keep the meter prism: works to within a sixth-stop, by the way. Nice stuff. Marc msmall@roanoke.infi.net FAX: +540/343-7315 Cha robh bas fir gun ghras fir!