KMZ Zenit-12SD

Push the stop-down lever on a Zenit-12SD and the finder goes dark as the lens closes to the aperture you picked. Somewhere in that gloom a needle swings, and you turn the aperture ring until it settles. For the first ten frames this feels clumsy, and then you stop noticing it. Press the release and the cloth shutter answers with a blunt mechanical clack that sounds older than the camera actually is.

Mechanically there is very little here that the Zenit-TTL did not already have. KMZ kept the stop-down through-the-lens meter, the automatic diaphragm for M42 auto lenses and the mechanical shutter running 1/30 to 1/500 plus B, then fitted a restyled speed dial. A later run went further and reshaped the top plate and the prism housing, so two 12SDs on the same shelf may not quite match. The plain Zenit-12, which kept the older dial, went mostly to export and special orders and stopped at 94,489 bodies. The 12SD was the volume model: KMZ built 468,956 of them between 1983 and 1994, and that number is the reason they turn up so often secondhand.

If you came here from the Zenit-E, the change that matters is where the meter looks. The E reads the scene through a selenium window above the lens; the 12SD reads the light that actually reaches the film, so a yellow filter or an extension tube is already counted. Against the export Zenit-12XP, the 12SD keeps the needle where the XP went to LEDs, and I would take the needle every time, because it shows how far off you are and not only which way.

It is a heavy, blunt camera. The usual kit lens is the Helios-44M-4 58mm f/2, and plenty of buyers want the body mostly as a way to get that lens and its busy, swirling backgrounds. No battery runs the shutter. The cell feeds the meter alone, so a dead one costs you the needle and nothing else. Film loading is ordinary hinged-back work. Mostly the camera ends up with Helios fans, or with anyone who wants a manual SLR cheap enough to drop without a second thought.

Where it lets you down is the shutter range. Nothing exists between 1/30 and B, so dim interiors and handheld dusk work fall straight off the dial. The top end is no better: on a bright beach with ISO 400 film, 1/500 at f/16 (the Helios's smallest stop) still leaves you most of a stop over, so slower film or an ND filter is the answer. Stop-down metering also dims the finder badly at small apertures in poor light, which is exactly when you most need to see the needle.

It is usually among the cheapest M42 bodies you can buy, and finding one with the Helios still mounted is common. The obvious rival is a Praktica MTL 3, another stop-down M42 body with a far wider speed range; the Zenit's only real argument is that it is the simpler machine. These meters are decades old, and needles stick or drift. When yours does, or when the light pushes you onto B, a reading from Zone Light Meter gives you the aperture or the timed exposure the camera can no longer work out for you, while the mechanical shutter carries on as if nothing happened.