'No Name' Contax....

Bar8barian said:
Zeiss were experimenting with coating 1936 - 1937 but they were putting the Smakula Vacuum - coating (hard coating) on batches of some Contax lenses before 1938.These are not "wet coated" lenses.
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But why should a rare experimental lens have ended up on a rather basic Contax fake Kiev?
 
I still have to see an original Zeiss 1930's coated lens which doesn't wear the red T on its namering. I had been owning a nice CZJ Sonnar 50/1.5 T from late 1937. Pale blue coating on the front element. Noticeable deterioration of the coating in the rear group.

Nothing to do with what looks like some Soviet purplish coating to me.
 
CameraQuest said:
see 3rd 1983 No Name Kiev Variation

http://www.rangefinderforum.com/forums/showthread.php?p=2092455#post2092455
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I see. That one seems to have been sold through Cambridge Camera only, and none seem to have made it back to Europe.

But if they did it twice, they may have done so more often, perhaps there are even more of these highly localized no-name versions around - anybody ran into versions not matching the currently known dates (63 or 83) or distributed in the eighties very much elsewhere or by a identified seller other than Cambridge?
 
Finally managed to run a roll of film through the camera (XP2), and just picked them up from Costco today (the shots below are Costco scans).

Overall I think they look pretty good -- shutter speeds seem fine, and the lens is actually quite nice -- whatever it is!


Kiev1 by Vince.Lupo, on Flickr


Kiev2 by Vince.Lupo, on Flickr


Kiev3 by Vince.Lupo, on Flickr


Kiev4 by Vince.Lupo, on Flickr


Kiev5 by Vince.Lupo, on Flickr


Kiev6 by Vince.Lupo, on Flickr


Kiev7 by Vince.Lupo, on Flickr


Kiev8 by Vince.Lupo, on Flickr
 
I had a close look at the back of the lens (without taking it apart, of course!), and I don't detect any serial numbers at all back there. So perhaps the mystery continues!
 
No Name Contax

No Name Contax

Vince,

You've a sweet camera there no matter what you call it. After WW2 the Soviets were awarded the rights to the Contax as war reparations and they took only the cameras, lenses etc but not the names of the cameras or lenses. They could have legally taken the names too. So Kievs are really Contax cameras made in the USSR and Jupiters etc are really Zeiss lenses made in the USSR.

Have you read this?

http://www.zeisshistorica.org/sample.html

If remember correctly the no name Contax of 1963 was sold in the US in 1969 with an instruction book that called it a Contax IV and came equiped with a new late model Carl Zeiss Sonnar from West Germany. The new Sonnar 50/1.5 was available from Zeiss dealers for just under $30 then (I bought one and still use it), so the importer could have acquired the lenses in the US.

Call it a Contax and enjoy it.

Bill
 
Bill, tons of useful info -- many thanks!

Think the next step is to try some colour film with it......brace yourselves!
 
Pleasant pictures. Nice to see the old shooters working again.

It is raining "no name" Kievs now, look at what I just found on the bay over my morning coffee (for the huge price of 47 euros :D ):
$T2eC16hHJGQE9noMcSRJBRTUs3uCB!~~60_12.JPG

Strangely, the seller is Ukrainian. Perhaps they were not all exported?

A nice addition to my Contax lineup anyway. The J8 is not the more common version either.
 
Yes, very, very pleasant pictures Vince, this is very rare to see such nice photos off a "test roll". Congrats. A few of them are even keepers (the sewing machine man and the lady's silhouette at the exhibition come to mind immediatly).

Your Kiev doesn't seem to suffer from any light leak, good point for you ! Most of them have some and this is hard to fix (the light leak being due to light finding its path somewhere between the front RF window and the film sprocket shaft, mainly because of bad machining tolerances of some metal light baffles, and sometimes even filling this area of the camera with foam doesn't solve it !).
 
Vince Lupo said:
I had a close look at the back of the lens (without taking it apart, of course!), and I don't detect any serial numbers at all back there. So perhaps the mystery continues!
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The serials should be stamped into the fixtures (on the side). It would require to take the whole optical block out of the mount to read them ;)
Should be an easy operation, but I wouldn't do it as the lens seems to behave great.
I would assume it's genuine Zeiss, looks okay to me from the outside.

Great shots btw.!
 
Vince Lupo said:
I had a close look at the back of the lens (without taking it apart, of course!), and I don't detect any serial numbers at all back there. So perhaps the mystery continues!
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Beginning to take the lens apart is easy and at no risk. Collapse the lens : then just at the edge of the collapsing tube a set screw will show up. Remove this set screw, then unscrew the whole optical fixture from the barrel by grabbing the front part of the lens and turning it CCW.

Then you will be able to look at the rear part of the optical fixture.

Genuine Sonnars are made of solid brass there, with a S/N stamped.

If it's black light alloy with nothing stamped on it, then you have a coated Jupiter-8 fixture put into a collapsible Sonnar barrel.

But, in any case, no big deal, that lens performs beautifully indeed.
 
S.H. said:
Strangely, the seller is Ukrainian. Perhaps they were not all exported?
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Arsenal workers could purchase rejects and were sometimes suspected of keeping the best to themselves (or feeding them into the black market), by declaring them defective or adding some cosmetic flaw. Some of the no-name production run will not have made it to export - and probably even more of the regular production will accidentally or intentionally have had blank front plates. Report back with the serial once you have it!
 
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