KMZ Zenit-412DX

Krasnogorsk had been making the same flat cloth-curtain clack for decades when the Zenit-412DX arrived, and this camera makes it too. The new part sits behind the film door: a set of contacts that read the checkerboard printed on a 35mm cassette. Take off the plastic shell and what is left is more or less a Zenit-312M with that one addition. KMZ built 21,257 of them between 2000 and 2003, a small run by Zenit standards.

It was the first Zenit to read DX codes instead of using a speed dial, and the feature does less than the name suggests. The factory manual is blunt about it. The contacts recognise ISO 100, 200 and 400 and nothing else. Load a cassette with no code, or a bulk-loaded roll in a reloadable can, and the meter assumes ISO 100. ISO 50 slide film, a roll of 800, HP5 you plan to push to 1600: none of them will meter correctly unless you compensate by hand, because the body has no dial for setting speed yourself.

Metering is stop-down through the lens, shown on three LEDs in the finder. Press the release to its first stop and the lens closes to taking aperture while the lights come on, red for over, green for correct, red for under. Hold it there, turn the aperture ring or the speed dial until the green one glows, then press through. Three lights are coarser than a needle but quicker to read at a glance. In a dim room the darkened screen gives you more trouble than the LEDs do. The batteries only run the meter. The cloth shutter is fully mechanical, so a dead cell leaves you 1/30 to 1/500 and B, minus the lights.

A top speed of 1/500 is where this body hurts most. Put a roll of 400 in it on a bright beach and you end up near f/16 for most frames. Below 1/30 there is only B, plus a release button that locks open for long exposures, so a dim interior means a tripod and counting seconds. Flash syncs at 1/30 alone, so daylight fill ghosts as soon as the subject moves. Next to an all-metal Zenit-E the plastic body is noticeably lighter, and much less convincing as something you could drop and keep shooting.

Kits came with the MC Zenitar-M2s 50mm f/2, a multicoated normal lens that still holds its own, and the M42 thread takes cheap Helios, Takumar and Zeiss Jena glass. For most owners the lenses are why they bought it. It is a late, mechanically simple M42 body with fewer years of wear on it than a Soviet-era Zenit, and students learning manual exposure get along with it fine. Its near-twin, the Zenit-412LS, followed from 2002 to 2005, with 25,197 built. Low production numbers aside, you buy either of them to shoot, not to keep in a cabinet.

That 100, 200 and 400 limit means the LEDs are wrong at box speed for a lot of film. Any uncoded roll meters as ISO 100, and anything outside those three speeds gets a reading you can't trust. For those rolls, and any time you rate film away from box speed, take the reading with the Zone Light Meter app at the speed you actually chose. Then set aperture and shutter by hand and ignore the lights. Every exposure control on the 412DX is manual, so the app's numbers go straight onto the camera.