Kiev 5 - First Impressions

W

wlewisiii

Guest
Sometimes you just gotta leap in both feet first. On the 10th I saw a Kiev 5 with 10 minutes left, no bidders and the lowest minimum I'd seen yet on one. I bid the minimum and won it. The package from the Ukrain arrived today.

Opening the package, it arrived in it's never-ready case, well wrapped in cotton. I opened it up and did a basic inspection. The camera is in very good cosmetic condition. It is a bit more top heavy than my Kiev 4a but nothing like I'd been lead to expect from reading on the web. It's not really any worse than the Contax III with it's light meter way up there.

The light meter reacts to light, though I haven't checked it's accuracy. The lever advance works smoothly - perhaps not as smooth as King Leica, but better than some I've spent more for. The film counter works correctly. The shutter speeds are backwards to rest of the Kiev series, but lift and change works as always. I don't have a shutter speed tester, but running through them all gives appropriate indications so the speeds are probably within normal FSU tolerances. The rewind crank is a hoot - it unfolds from the side and takes many revolutions to rewind a roll. An idea better in concept than it will be in practice, I fear. The take up spool was missing, but I had a spare from a parts Contax III that fit fine. I loaded up a roll of Konica C41 BW that also was in todays mail (Thanks Fraley!) and did note that the rewind does turn with advancing the film for a confirmation that it's loaded correctly.

The finder is the real revalation on this camera. It's clear, bigger than the other Kievs and quite bright. The outside edge shows very nearly the same view as my home brew finder. Inside of that is the bright line for 50 mm. that is nice an easy to see. Inside of that are 4 angle marks at the corners of the 85mm FOV. The RF patch appears to be the same size as the traditional Contax/Kiev so it will work as a bit undersized 135mm finder. All in all this is a very nice finder and even if the rest didn't work out for arsenal, I wish they could have found a way to put it into the Kiev 4am/4m line. Since the 85 lines are apparenty a very late addition to the camera, it would appear that this camera (7204507) must have been near the end.

So far, I'm pretty favorably impressed. I'll get a chance tomorrow afternoon (since I work in the AM) to take it out and do some shooting. I hope the weather will be sunny and warm (at least what passes for warm in Wisconsin in February!) and get the roll one hour dunked and scanned. With luck, in 24 hours I'll have some results to share.

William
 
Congratulations, William. Your description makes it sound as though you received a very nice example of a rare Kiev camera. I look forward to seeing some images from it.

Walker
 
Thanks for the update from the Kiev 5 side, looks like you have a good one on your hands ! According to Princelle again, the finder on the second gen. Kiev 5 (two were made) is 0.7x, while the first one had a 1:1 finder. That could give you a nice finder for a 35mm lens but I don't know if the outer bayonet is compatible with the previous Kiev models :confused:

Btw that the second gen. Kiev was introduced together with the FASTER lens ever made for a 35mm camera (that I know to the date), the monster Rekord 50 f/0.9, that's 0.05 faster than the Canon Dream.

Brian, are you listening ? You're feeling tired, very tired, you can only hear my voice... you're going to go out there and find a Kiev-5 with the 50/0.9...
 
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Question:
I have read that the Kiev 5 sports a standard lens (50mm) that uses the external bayonette mount. My understanding is that the internal mount for the standard 50 had changed so that it wasn't possible to mount standard 50's on the camera. Is that true? Does the camera still have an internal ring to mount other lenses with rangefinder coupling? Did they just get rid of the thin "latch" for the 50's tab?
 
Jdos2:
The 50mm mount is different from all others in the Contax/Kiev line - this is probably it's biggest weakness as a user camera. I am unable to mount my Zeiss Sonnar 50/2.0 on it or it's Jupiter 8NB (new bayonette?) on my other Contax and Kievs. They fully removed the internal mount leaving only the external mount. OTOH, my SC Skopar and Jupiter 9 mount and appear to work just fine. I'll know more when I toddle back to Walgreens in an hour or so for the first roll. I have one portrait with the Jupiter 9 that I am really hoping turns out.

Taffer:
Looking through the finder at something nice and close makes it clear that 0.7x sounds just about right. That may have been influenced by when they added the 85mm finder lines. The whole of the finder does pretty much match the view from my 35mm homebrewed finder, so I shot the SC Skopar using the whole finder that way. We'll see how it works.

In use it's a bit clunky, but compared to some MF cameras it's still quite easy to deal with. The lever advance and brightline finder make it very easy to use. The meter appears to be reasonably accurate outdoors (seleniums strong suit) but since it tops out at GOST 250, I'll stick to using my VC Meter II in its shoe. The flash sync works well. The remote release on the shutter button is a little flakey, but I don't tend to dig out that cable much anyway.

Kieth Berry comments on his website:
http://www.keithberry.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/kiev-4.htm
"It is much better built than I was expecting from comments that I've read, and I find it very pleasant to use and its apparent extra weight seems to help in keeping it still during exposures. It's an interesting bridge between the classic Kiev and a conventional rangefinder of more modern design, and I'm quite surprised that it is not in much greater demand as a user's rangefinder camera."

So far I find that I agree.

William
 
How is the rangefinder coupled to the lens? Is there a rotating ring of any kind inside the external mount?

I'm sorry for asking questions like this- I've never seen one in person, and am very curious about it.

JD
 
Ok, got the roll back. A couple of nice shots are up in my gallery for those who are interested. I'm liking what I see so far. Of course, most of the roll is test shots that have little interest other than proving to me that the RF is doing it's thing correctly, but there is still some fun stuff there, I think.

William
 
Oooh. The translation automatic, that page- hurts, yes, my eyes. Like Honda 360 "Fine Japanese Mortorvehicle![sic]" or Jean Shepherd: "If fuse is not twisted?"
 
taffer said:
Thanks for the update from the Kiev 5 side, looks like you have a good one on your hands ! According to Princelle again, the finder on the second gen. Kiev 5 (two were made) is 0.7x, while the first one had a 1:1 finder. That could give you a nice finder for a 35mm lens but I don't know if the outer bayonet is compatible with the previous Kiev models.

Btw that the second gen. Kiev was introduced together with the FASTER lens ever made for a 35mm camera (that I know to the date), the monster Rekord 50 f/0.9, that's 0.05 faster than the Canon Dream.
Click to expand...


There's an excellent little Kiev history page on CameraQuest written by Peter Hennig, and its paragraph and photo on the Rekord f/0.9 (actual focal length 52mm, by the way) indicates that it never got out of the prototype stage, so it still doesn't quite nudge the Canon off its perch as the fastest production lens ever offered for a full-frame 35mm still camera.

This same article indicates that the original Kiev 5 began appearing in 1968-69, and the Rekord was slated for introduction in 1971. Still, I would guess they might have been designed together, the same way that the Canon 7 and its 50/0.95 lens were. In fact, I wonder if the reason Kiev omitted the inner bayonet mount might have been to provide rear element clearance for this monster lens...?

(I'm sure many would-be Kiev 5 shooters would agree that the most infuriating aspect of this camera is its inability to mount any of the older Kiev 50mm lenses... so wouldn't it be doubly frustrating if it turned out that the reason Kiev did that was to make room for an ultra-speed lens that was never actually produced?!? The 50/1.8 in Kiev-5-only mount that came on mine strikes me as a mediocre optic at best, but as it's impossible to mount one of their earlier good old Sonnar copies, you're more or less stuck with it...)

The idea of a 1:1 viewfinder would have made sense in this context, too, providing just that little extra bit of focusing accuracy needed for an f/0.9 lens. What's confusing, though, is the Princelle quote's assertion that the 1:1 finder appeared on the second model... vs. my own observation that my 1971 Kiev 5 definitely has the lower-magnification 0.7x finder and NO 85mm finder frame line, while William notes that his 1974 example has an 0.7x finder with both 50 and 85 frames.

This makes it sound as if there were at least three finder variants. So, did the 0.7x/50 finder model I have come first, then the 1x/50 finder model mentioned by Princelle, then the 0.7x/50&85 model William has? Or did the 1x/50 version come even later than William's 1974 model? Or was the 1x model a separate subtype intended for the Rekord lens? Or did they just intermix 1x and 0.7x finders depending on the mood of the moment?

Incidentally: William, is the 50mm frame in your finder a perfect rectangle, or is it slightly trapezoidal (taller at one end than the other) like mine? If they straightened out the rectangle at the same time they added the 85mm frameline, it would make me wonder if there might have been other optical improvements to the finder as well.

So few Kiev 5s, so many questions...
 
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Aha! William, I see by your gallery that your Kiev 5 has a 50/2 Jupiter-8 NB lens! Mine has a [something unspellable with Roman characters]-94 50/1.8... no wonder your shots are sharper than mine!

I wonder how many normal lenses Kiev offered for this camera...
 
jlw said:
Incidentally: William, is the 50mm frame in your finder a perfect rectangle, or is it slightly trapezoidal (taller at one end than the other) like mine? If they straightened out the rectangle at the same time they added the 85mm frameline, it would make me wonder if there might have been other optical improvements to the finder as well.
Click to expand...

As near as my eyes can tell, it's a correct rectangle. I also notice that the RF patch is below the center of the finder window, making it more difficult to use the patch as an improvised 135mm finder. OTOH, the shorter rangefinder base length, especially with a 0.7x magnification, probably means this is not the best Contax mount camera for 135mm lenses... :eek:


[QUOTE} So few Kiev 5s, so many questions...[/QUOTE]

Isn't that just the truth?

Another interesting thing I'm noticing with this one, web ones and so forth - I think the later the camera, the more likely the standard lens is to be the Jupiter-8NB rather than the Helios lens. If it is optically identical to the Jupiter-8m, it would be a good lens and the one I have certainly seems to be. The Helios may have been an earlier, less successful, formulation of the design that would become the Helios-103 eventually?

William
 
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