Collecting stories of bad experiences with Russian lenses

ForenSeil · Joined: 15 Apr 2011 Posts: 2726 Location: Kiel, Germany.

Eastern Germany (Trabant was made in GDR) was not in USSR officially due some postwar-agreements with the Allies,... but in practice economy, politics, religion and anything else was under the same Sovjet ccupation the rest of the eastern block. "
Also the Trabant was made in eastern Germany but exportet a lot within the sovjet union according to Wikipedia, so it's not an GDR exclusive at all.
So I think the analogy works very good with a Trabant.

PS: I still wonder if there are lenses made in North Korea. When the wall falls there I know where I have to spend my first hollidays.

PPS: It's a myth that the Trabant was made from pressboard. Some parts where made of duroplaste which contained fibres, which were sometimes made of cellulose. Duroplaste strengthened with fibres is not exactly pressboard ^^

PPPS: Not all sovjet optics where made fully of metal if you look a little closer. Some sovjet lenses were even almost completly made of plastic, like Zenitar M2s, which may contain even less metal than a modern AF-kit-zoom by Canon. And a few of the full-metal lenses like some of the rangefinder Industars have a imho very crappy build quality, because they are not made of very thin pierced crap-metal-sheets.

skida · Posted: Tue Nov 05, 2013 2:20 pm Post subject:

I think in the early 70s, the Helios lenses had a fault. When I got my first Zenit EM with the 44M lens, I found the photos were badly composed and often blurred. Things are a little better these days, so maybe the lenses got better. Wink

asterinex · Joined: 04 Nov 2012 Posts: 311

I have an Helios 44-M where de aperture ring is placed the wrong way.
f22 or f16 is wide open vice versa... Smile

ForenSeil · Joined: 15 Apr 2011 Posts: 2726 Location: Kiel, Germany.

Industar-61 LD for LTM is one of the "russian" lenses I really don't like. A good sample that full metal does nothing has to do with good build quality. And as it's cheap, mass produced in the later years of the USSR it's also a good sample for quality spreading. Maybe I only had very bad luck but:

I had about 5 of them. Three of them at the same time and two of these three were never used before, perfectly mint conidtion.
All had build quality issues.
Aluminium-alloy used for them is very light but also very soft and thin. You can bend the filter screw mount with one or two fingers (3 of my 5 lenses already had bended filter screw mounts).
Coating was uneven on a few of them.
One or two of them had stiff focusing, and one had an defective aperture, but most had too low resistance and all of them were more or less uneven in resistance while focusing, even the unused ones were both very undamped, loose and slightly uneven. I've disassambled two of the industars for relubing - their mechanics are luckily very primitive, so easy to repair, even for an amateur.
Rangfinder coupling was also a problem. On small distances even the unused ones were slightly inaccurate. But that's not a problem because this lens is slightly soft at wide apertures anyway and has his sweet spot on F11.
Also they all had slight copy variation in IQ, nothing big, but noticable in direct comparision.
I expected that the IQ would much better than from Industar 50, because I saw some promising MTF charts of this lens in the web adn the lens is supposed to have a much more modern design with its Lanthanum glas, but all of copies were worse than the Industar 50 I had before, especially wide open. IQ was was "usable" but not good imho, especially when compared to the much older Elmars 50/3.5 made in 1925-195X which are optically and especially mechanically and haptically better. My unused Industars were both made in close to 1990 I think.
IQ is pretty soft wide open @F2.8 (softer than my Minolta MD 50/1.4 wide open), still soft at F4, corner and center both become better at F8 and sweet spot is F11 on FF. The lens produces also some moderate distortion on film, which was quite suprising for a slow 50mm lens. CAs were sometimes also visible but not worse than many faster 50mm. There might have be also some focus shift while stopping down, but as said it doesn't matter as the lens is so slow at its sweet spot and the RF coupling isn't ment to be accurate anyway.

It's maybe the worst USSR lens I've ever tried, both in mechanics and optics. Of course it's capable of delivering great images, and "good" image quality stopped down.
Get an Industar-22 or Industar-50 instead, they should be better!

enzodm · Joined: 11 Sep 2010 Posts: 350 Location: Italy

Farside · Expire: 2013-12-27

BurstMox · Expire: 2016-08-02

I just hope this topik will make prices of soviet lenses decrease on the bay Very Happy

enzodm · Joined: 11 Sep 2010 Posts: 350 Location: Italy

philslizzy · Joined: 07 Aug 2012 Posts: 4745 Location: Cheshire, England

I had a Jupiter 11a stuck hood it was a bloody nightmare to remove.

More complaints will come when people realise how crap the edge performance is on the new full frame cameras.

BurstMox · Expire: 2016-08-02

fermy · Joined: 17 Feb 2012 Posts: 1974

Dogtag · Joined: 27 Jul 2013 Posts: 164 Location: Holland del norte

iangreenhalgh1 · Expire: 2014-01-07

Actually, the AK-47 isn't anything like the Stg-44, they might look similar, but they are very different mechanically. You can argue that the AK's 7.62x39 round was inspired by the German 7.92x33 Kurz because a 1943 committee studied the German round and the American .30 Carbine in order to decide on a new round for future Soviet battle rifles.

I've got five J8s, all 1950s ones and they are superb, I've compared them to pukka Zeiss Sonnars and they are every bit as good. Not everything is aluminium, the helicoids are brass. I can't speak for Canon, not havingowned one, but there is very little difference in quality between my 1957 Jupiter-11 4/135 and my 1955 Schneider Tele-Xenar 4/135.

Quality issues with Soviet lenses didn't begin until the latter half of the 1960s, so buy one from 1965 or earlier and you won't have a problem. On good example is my 1963 Juipter-3, side-by-side with my 1938 CZJ Sonnar 1.5/50, the fit and finish is very similar and optically, there's nothing to chose between them. Actually, my 1963 Kiev isn't far behind my 1955 Contax in overall quality.

Dogtag · Joined: 27 Jul 2013 Posts: 164 Location: Holland del norte

ForenSeil · Joined: 15 Apr 2011 Posts: 2726 Location: Kiel, Germany.

iangreenhalgh1 · Expire: 2014-01-07

It's not true at all that you need to buy five J8s to make a good one, I have five J8s, owned 3 others that I've sold, all of them were excellent, but they were all in the 1957-1963 range, maybe with the later ones the quality varies, but still, I think it's exaggeration to say you need five to find a good one. This was with a 1958 J8 at f4, classical Sonnar bokeh that smooths out the very busy background, the same shot with a double-gauss type would be far less nice:

I've had three I-61s, all three were great, easily as good as my 1950s I-50 and I-22, or any of my CZJ Tessar 2.8/50s. This is one of my I-61s, wide open in crappy light, the contrast is stronger than the I-22 or I-50 or the Tessar:

Maybe I'm just lucky, but I simply can't find all these crappy Russians people talk about. My latest Soviet purchase was a mint 1973 Jupiter-11 in M42 and it shoots just as well as my zebra CZJ Sonnar 3.5/135. Here it is wide open, very sharp, no CA, strong contrast in crappy light:

Laurentiu Cristofor · Joined: 23 Oct 2010 Posts: 524 Location: WA, USA

Thanks for the replies and comments!

To organize the feedback, I think it would fall under three categories:

1. mechanical aspects - anyone that has used Soviet tech knows it was crude but effective. Products were meant to do the job and keep doing it. Comparisons with firearms are appropriate here, especially since factories like KMZ were also doing military work. I don't look at such aspects as negative - they just represent a different manufacturing philosophy.

2. poor lubricants - right, this is perhaps the only aspect on which everyone agrees there is a problem. However, this should be easily fixed with a cleanup and the use of the best lubricants available today. This does not make a lens a dud in itself.

3. calibration - I would worry here mainly about optical calibration, i.e. assembly of optical elements, but so far I have not seen any significant evidence to point to such issues. Infinity focus issues could be due to adapters. Rangefinder calibration is a non-issue to me given my use on modern cameras and I don't think it was a goal even then - lenses were calibrated on the camera they were sold with and I thought it was expected that using them on another camera would require a rangefinder re-adjustment (there were screws to turn on the camera body for doing that).

Most of the issues mentioned could be solved with a CLA, but I guess the deterrent is that a CLA may cost as much as the lens did.

A few more comments on what was mentioned earlier in the thread:

wrt CZJ lenses and East German lenses in general - I can also confirm that I encountered more issues with them than with Soviet items. The focusing ring of a Tessar started by being stiff and then completely broke - I couldn't figure out how to open the lens, so I am not sure what kind of mechanism it used to breakdown like that.

wrt Trabant - that is not an example of Soviet tech. Its use was widespread in the Communist block, but typical Soviet cars were Volga, Moskvitch, and later the Lada already mentioned. These were all very solid cars. The Trabant was one of a kind - the closest thing that comes to mind is a Wartburg, but that is only because they both used two-stroke engines that interfered with TV antenna reception and you could always tell when one was driving next to your home Smile

Mir · Expire: 2017-09-30

For a totally professional CLA for your Russian lenses contact :
Yuri in New York mail@fedka.com

He'll have you send your lenses to is tech in Ukraine and for a very, very resonnable fee, it'll come back "as new" !

I sent him my:
M39 KMZ 1959 Silver ЮПИТЕР-9 2/8,5cm П No5909447 w/15 blades and my
M42 KOMZ 1969 Silver ЮПИТЕР-11 4/135 No6921649 w/12 blades

Both came back absolutely beautiful... cleaned, lubed, ajusted, calibrated, shined and even a dented filter ring was brought back perfect !

NOTE: i get nothing out of this, i'm just a satisfied customer...

dimitrygo · Joined: 01 Apr 2009 Posts: 561