Jocko
Off With The Pixies
Keith - What fools the paper were to crop your great picture!
They were certainly supposed to! Actually things varied from factory to factory and at different periods. For example, earlier Kievs are famously well built, whilst the final versions, produced in the 80s, were generally made to a far lower standard. There's a story that c.1980 a team of inspectors arrived from Moscow and threw out weeks of camera production as literally nothing worked. The tale at least shows that there were quality standards. Even today the Arsenal works supposedly has no meaningful quality control, hence camera "reprocessors" like Arax.
Oleg confirmed to me that KMZ cameras - Zenits, Zorkis, Mirs etc - were normally produced to higher tolerances than those from other concerns. I suspect this is because the factory made high-precision gear for the military and related aerospace projects. It was normal Soviet industrial practice to produce military and civilian goods on the same production lines - the famous tanks/tractors principle. In such circumstances manufacturing equipment, worker training, craftsmanship and quality control would have - at least by Soviet standards - to be fairly good.
There's a parallel with Soviet cars. GAZ, a factory which churned out army trucks and jeeps, also made (and make) the Volga; a better-built vehicle than most Russian models.
keithslater said:
They were certainly supposed to! Actually things varied from factory to factory and at different periods. For example, earlier Kievs are famously well built, whilst the final versions, produced in the 80s, were generally made to a far lower standard. There's a story that c.1980 a team of inspectors arrived from Moscow and threw out weeks of camera production as literally nothing worked. The tale at least shows that there were quality standards. Even today the Arsenal works supposedly has no meaningful quality control, hence camera "reprocessors" like Arax.
Oleg confirmed to me that KMZ cameras - Zenits, Zorkis, Mirs etc - were normally produced to higher tolerances than those from other concerns. I suspect this is because the factory made high-precision gear for the military and related aerospace projects. It was normal Soviet industrial practice to produce military and civilian goods on the same production lines - the famous tanks/tractors principle. In such circumstances manufacturing equipment, worker training, craftsmanship and quality control would have - at least by Soviet standards - to be fairly good.
There's a parallel with Soviet cars. GAZ, a factory which churned out army trucks and jeeps, also made (and make) the Volga; a better-built vehicle than most Russian models.
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