chojna
Member
As I understand it at the present time a Voitlander (M and screw type) lens is a cheap(relatively) substitute for a Leica lens.
What I was wondering is ,after the Second World War, when did the Soviet Union start a serious export drive to sell Kievs and their lenses as a cheap alternative to Contax items.I guess never in the case of the USA but what of Europe?
When (if ever) would I have been able to go into a camera shop and ask the price of a Contax & Kiev 135mm to compare?
If this was not the case when /how did the USSR market their Kievs outside the Soviet Union?
Hope this not too obscure and boring
What I was wondering is ,after the Second World War, when did the Soviet Union start a serious export drive to sell Kievs and their lenses as a cheap alternative to Contax items.I guess never in the case of the USA but what of Europe?
When (if ever) would I have been able to go into a camera shop and ask the price of a Contax & Kiev 135mm to compare?
If this was not the case when /how did the USSR market their Kievs outside the Soviet Union?
Hope this not too obscure and boring
jlw
Rangefinder camera pedant
First: Describing the C-V lenses as "cheap substitutes" has negative connotations (which you may have intended, but maybe not.) It's probably more fair to describe them as less-expensive alternatives which fit many of the same cameras. In general their performance is very high, far better than average and often better than all but the most modern Leica lens designs.
Back to Kievs: I don't think there ever would have been a time when you would have been able to walk into a camera store and make a DIRECT price comparision between comparable Contax and Kiev models. The reason is simply that there was never a time after the war when Zeiss-Ikon (Contax) and Arsenal (Kiev) were making the same camera model.
Zeiss-Ikon was not able to go back into full production of the Contax II and III after the war because their original factory in Dresden had been heavily damaged in bombing raids and later was taken over by the Soviet army of occupation. Some of the factory machinery was moved to the Carl Zeiss lens plant in Jena, and very small numbers of Contax II and III cameras were made there, but eventually the production lines were shipped off to Arsenal and used to start up production of Kievs.
Meanwhile, the Zeiss-Ikon company moved its headquarters to Stuttgart, in the Western zone --but lacking the machinery and drawings, they were unable to resume production of the same cameras. Instead, they moved on to the completely redesigned Contax IIa and IIIa, which first appeared in 1949.
So, during the period 1945-1949, there were almost no new Zeiss-Ikon Contax cameras being manufactured, and no Kievs; from 1949 on, Arsenal was producing its own version of the "old" camera as the Kiev, while Zeiss-Ikon was producing the newer, and arguably much improved, Contax IIa and IIIa. There are enough differences between a II/III and a IIa/IIIa that direct price comparisons wouldn't have been very meaningful -- the consumer would have been able to tell that it wasn't an "apples-to-apples" comparison.
To some extent, the same goes for lenses. Arsenal re-introduced many of the old Carl Zeiss formulas, but usually in aluminum barrels of lower finish quality; by the time Carl Zeiss got its Contax lens lines back up and running, it had introduced some later formulas and its level of finish was much higher. Again, the consumer would have been able to see that the comparison was "apples to oranges."
If you were willing to overlook these differences, you would have been able to compare prices at any time up until 1961, when production of the Contax IIa and IIIa ceased. But the price comparison would have been distorted somewhat by a number of factors: because of Cold War animosity, the Soviet cameras weren't always sold under their own names, but sometimes under store-chain names; because of the obvious quality differences, it was rare for the same stores to sell both brands side-by-side; and the Soviet government had a habit of setting the prices of export goods based on its need for foreign currency, meaning items sometimes were sold at artificially low prices.
How the FSU cameras were marketed in other countries is a convoluted story about which I don't have a lot of information; advertising and marketing materials would be an interesting thing to try to collect!
Back to Kievs: I don't think there ever would have been a time when you would have been able to walk into a camera store and make a DIRECT price comparision between comparable Contax and Kiev models. The reason is simply that there was never a time after the war when Zeiss-Ikon (Contax) and Arsenal (Kiev) were making the same camera model.
Zeiss-Ikon was not able to go back into full production of the Contax II and III after the war because their original factory in Dresden had been heavily damaged in bombing raids and later was taken over by the Soviet army of occupation. Some of the factory machinery was moved to the Carl Zeiss lens plant in Jena, and very small numbers of Contax II and III cameras were made there, but eventually the production lines were shipped off to Arsenal and used to start up production of Kievs.
Meanwhile, the Zeiss-Ikon company moved its headquarters to Stuttgart, in the Western zone --but lacking the machinery and drawings, they were unable to resume production of the same cameras. Instead, they moved on to the completely redesigned Contax IIa and IIIa, which first appeared in 1949.
So, during the period 1945-1949, there were almost no new Zeiss-Ikon Contax cameras being manufactured, and no Kievs; from 1949 on, Arsenal was producing its own version of the "old" camera as the Kiev, while Zeiss-Ikon was producing the newer, and arguably much improved, Contax IIa and IIIa. There are enough differences between a II/III and a IIa/IIIa that direct price comparisons wouldn't have been very meaningful -- the consumer would have been able to tell that it wasn't an "apples-to-apples" comparison.
To some extent, the same goes for lenses. Arsenal re-introduced many of the old Carl Zeiss formulas, but usually in aluminum barrels of lower finish quality; by the time Carl Zeiss got its Contax lens lines back up and running, it had introduced some later formulas and its level of finish was much higher. Again, the consumer would have been able to see that the comparison was "apples to oranges."
If you were willing to overlook these differences, you would have been able to compare prices at any time up until 1961, when production of the Contax IIa and IIIa ceased. But the price comparison would have been distorted somewhat by a number of factors: because of Cold War animosity, the Soviet cameras weren't always sold under their own names, but sometimes under store-chain names; because of the obvious quality differences, it was rare for the same stores to sell both brands side-by-side; and the Soviet government had a habit of setting the prices of export goods based on its need for foreign currency, meaning items sometimes were sold at artificially low prices.
How the FSU cameras were marketed in other countries is a convoluted story about which I don't have a lot of information; advertising and marketing materials would be an interesting thing to try to collect!