dating an industar

[rxmd]

OK, for the record: all of my lenses mentioned above were made at the FED factory. So the 68.... I-61 might well be coincidence.

Quasit, could you give me a source for the information?

 

[QUAsit]

Either Princelle as English one, or Russian language sources, e.g.: www.photohistory.ru

 

[rxmd]

Thanks. Princelle doesn't really talk about serial numbers IIRC. http://www.photohistory.ru/ looks quite interesting at first glance on the other hand, if a bit unstructured - you have to dig for the information a little bit, but it has a lot. I especially like the small excerpts from older Sovetskoe Foto articles. 🙂

Philipp

 

[QUAsit]

Then only practice with FSU gear could help. Unfortunately deep look into it possible only iа living in FSU countries.

(Small exception - I never saw Orion-15 for Kiev and collabsible ZKs and some other lenses in real life - Pictures of foreign owners/books only.)

 

[rxmd]

Oh, at present I spend about half of my time in FSU countries, so this is not a problem. 🙂

 

[Sylvaticus]

I still have an Industar 22 with Cyrilic inscriptions, that I bought in near-mint condition 1958. The number is 7168057 - that looks as though the last two digits indicate the year.

 

[paniolo]

Hello Photographers,
is there a significant difference between late and earlier Industar 22/50's?
Ive got an Nickel Elmar from 1930 that is uncoated and can produce sharp but still very soft images.
Compared to my extreme scratched Industar from '54 the Industar is sharper and has more contrast. Of course it is coated.

What about younger models, lets say from the 60/70/80's... is there advanced coating and better image quality?

The point is, I realy love the look of Jupiter 8 and 3 but they are too huge and block the viewfinder of my tiny Leica II 😀

 

[KnipsOmat]

I still have an Industar 22 with Cyrilic inscriptions, that I bought in near-mint condition 1958. The number is 7168057 - that looks as though the last two digits indicate the year.

That's just a coincidence. The last digits of the serial number never indicate the year in any soviet-made lens or camera.

However, there are some camera bodies and lenses in which the first digit indicates the year of manufacturing (leaving off the century and the decade, so "7" could be 1957 or 1967). This is the case for many FED cameras.

One example I know of is FED-3. Single-digit date prefix for all early FED-3 with advance knob and for the first advance lever FED-3's until 1966. A FED-3 with serial no. 1.022.000 is made 1961, a FED-3 with serial no. 4.300.000 is made 1964. The other numbers after the first digit are just counted up from zero in this case. You can see the scheme clearly on http://www.sovietcams.com/index.php?-413247904

For FED-3, the numbering scheme changed in 1967, these cameras have a two-digit date prefix 67. Starting with 1968, there was no date prefix at all on the FED-3 bodies.

Anyway, this is by no means the case with all Industar lenses, nor is it true for all FED or all Zorki cameras. Numbering schemes changed over time.

Some have one-digit date prefix, some have two-digit date prefix, some have no date prefix at all.