Throwback Edit Version: I edited this in January 2025, checked the links and converted it to the new WordPress blocks format if needed. 

The first film camera I ever owned was a Zenit 11. I bought it from a catalogue and paid weekly with my pocket money. It was all I could afford. It was manual and had a little pin you had to match up to another pin to find the correct setting. It felt like a brick. I couldn’t afford the more advanced TTL which had a Through The Lens metering system. Looking back now I know that the 11 taught me a lot, aperture, speed and stuff. But at the time, I wanted the next step up, the beginnings of camera envy. So when I saw this one on eBay for a pittance I dived in.

I had forgotten what a brick it was. I put in some expired film and went for a walk around Leeds. I felt weird trying to do street photography there, it seemed much more aggressive than Tokyo. On the whole, Japanese people are reserved and non-confrontational. Yorkshire people are made of different stock and a few told me right up front to stop and “F… Off”. Apart from the main gentleman you see in the photos who was very interested in the camera and asked why I had a Zenit. But in the end, I gave up and went to the Corn Exchange.

As you can see, they are all a bit under-exposed. As the camera is not voltage reliant I thought maybe it was the fault of the film. So I tried another half of a roll.

The shot straight into the sun is a little funky and the lens could not handle that. The rest are ok, maybe a little over. Either way, my example seemed to be a little hit-and-miss on the TTL side. The comments on this blog say the same thing, a brick of a camera with an unreliable metering system. The camera is a bit of an eye-catcher, but there are much better cameras out there for not much more money. There are even better Russian cameras. There is nothing special about this one to go into major technical details, the quickest speed is 1/500th. The usual accompanying lens has apertures between f2 to f16, so nothing really special there either. A no-frills, cheap camera that weighs as much as a small car.

Keep or Sell: Sold.