KMZ Zenit-AM2

Twenty-seven thousand two hundred and forty. KMZ built that many AM2 bodies between 1992 and 1997, more than the Zenit-AM it came from, and the AM2 is the version with something taken away. The Zenit-AM manual says it in one line: the AM-2 version has no self-timer. The catalogue lists no other change. You get the same Pentax K bayonet and the same electronic metal shutter, which chooses its own time anywhere from a full second to 1/1000. There are still two mechanical settings, B and 1/125 X. If you never touched the self-timer on an AM, you are holding much the same camera.

It shoots the way an aperture-priority body should. Turn the aperture ring, focus, press. No speed dial needs checking, because there are no manual speeds to check. Most of the M42 Zenits, the E, EM, TTL and 12 series, make you set the speed yourself, so anyone coming off one of those will feel the change in rhythm straight away. Your attention goes to depth of field and the focus point, and the camera handles the time.

The bayonet is what sets it apart from most of the family. The standard MC Helios-44K-4 58mm f/2 puts the familiar Helios-44 rendering, swirl included, on a K mount, so changing lenses takes a short twist instead of several careful turns of a screw thread. That opens up decades of manual K-mount glass with aperture rings, from Pentax and the third-party makers. Later Pentax lenses that have no aperture ring are out, since this body has no way to set their aperture. For a student who wants a Soviet camera without being tied to Soviet lenses, the mount matters more than anything on the top plate.

On auto there is no way to pick the speed, so the meter's verdict is the exposure unless you fool it with the film-speed dial or drop to 1/125. A singer under one spotlight on a black stage will mislead any reflected reading. Turning the aperture ring on this body won't fix it either. It just trades depth of field for shutter time, and the exposure stays wherever the meter put it. The automatic range runs on batteries, too. When they go flat you are left with B and 1/125.

That mechanical 1/125 is how you get control back. It fires without power. Set it, take a reading at 1/125 with the Zone Light Meter app, and set the aperture yourself: a deliberate manual exposure from a body that never had a manual mode. The same setting is X sync, so it is also the flash speed. B covers anything long, timed by hand.

The AM2 was supplied with the Helios-44K-4 as its standard lens, and some late bodies carry export markings in Latin letters. The camera to cross-shop it against is the Pentax ME, the same automatic-only K-mount idea built with more refinement. The ME is the nicer object to hold. What the Zenit offers is a Helios on a bayonet out of the box, and if aperture and focus are all you want to think about, it asks nothing more of you. A photographer who wants to pick 1/60 by hand should buy a body that offers it.