KMZ Zenit-122

At a Sunday flea market, someone lifts a Zenit-122 and turns the Helios until the split-image line closes on a stallholder's face. Then they stop the lens down to meter and the finder goes murky. A red LED comes on. One click of the shutter dial and the green one lights instead, and the cloth shutter fires with a coarse Krasnogorsk clack that sounds more like a desk stapler than a precision instrument. KMZ sold that routine to a lot of people. By the time production ended in 2005 the factory had built 1,971,745 of them, which puts the 122 among the best-selling Zenits of the late years.

The Zenit-E guessed at the light with a selenium cell over the lens, and the Zenit-TTL moved the reading behind the glass and showed it with a needle. Then the export 12XP traded that needle for LEDs. The 122 is a later step on the same stop-down M42 road, carrying the 12XP's light readout into a molded ABS shell: one red LED for over, another for under, green when you match. The plastic puts some people off, though the mechanism underneath is the familiar one. KMZ dressed the camera up for its own 50th anniversary in 1992 and again in 1995 for the 50th anniversary of victory in the Second World War. Latin American buyers got it as the Zenit-12XL, while the Zenit-122B (or 122V) was a stripped domestic version.

Focusing is easier than the finder's dimness would suggest. A split-image center is surrounded by a microprism ring, so you can snap focus wide open even in a dim hallway. The trouble starts when you meter. Because it is stop-down, at f/8 or f/11 the screen gets dark and the LEDs are the brightest thing you can see. The shutter is fully mechanical, 1/30 to 1/500 plus B, so the camera keeps firing when the meter battery dies. Flash syncs at 1/30 and nothing else.

Most of these came with a Helios-44 58mm f/2, and plenty of buyers today want it for the lens. The M42 thread also takes decades of screw-mount glass from Jena, Asahi and the Soviet optical plants, which is why students and anyone on a tight budget keep using the 122 as a cheap, battery-independent carrier for old lenses.

The weakness is how little room you get. A 1/500 top speed with ISO 400 film on a bright beach leaves you at f/16 with nowhere left to go. A 1/30 sync speed makes daylight fill flash awkward unless you use slow film and stop well down. And the meter tells you over, under or correct, never by how much, so you can't use it to put deep shadows on a particular zone. Take a spot or incident reading with Zone Light Meter, decide where the shadows belong, and set speed and aperture by hand. The 122 is fully manual anyway.

Prices stay at the bottom of the SLR market, and plenty of bodies sell only to get the Helios off the front. A common alternative is a Praktica MTL 3, whose needle at least shows how far off you are, or one of the earlier Zenits. The 122's case is the focusing screen and a shutter that never asks for power. Buy one as a working body for that Helios and it asks for little beyond film, a cell for the lights, and tolerance for the noise.