BelOMO Zenit-ET

Open the back of a Zenit-ET on a darkroom bench and leave the light seals alone for a minute. Look for the serial number stamped inside the door instead. Its first two digits are the year. If they read 81 or 82, the camera might be one of the 61,099 that KMZ built at Krasnogorsk before production moved on. Anything later is BelOMO's work from Vileyka in Belarus, and BelOMO made roughly three million of them. Own a Zenit-ET and you almost certainly own a Belarusian one.

What BelOMO built was a modernised Zenit-EM, and a good share of the changes look like cost cutting. The top and bottom covers are plastic. So are plenty of the parts inside. Next to an older all-metal Zenit, those plastic covers make the ET feel lighter and a little hollow in the hand, at least to me. Underneath, the layout is unchanged: an M42 thread mount, a cloth focal-plane shutter running 1/30 to 1/500 plus B, and a selenium cell that never needs a battery. Most bodies keep the EM's automatic diaphragm. Not all of them do.

That meter is uncoupled. You read the needle and then set the lens and the speed dial yourself, which is slower than the match-needle Zenit-TTL but leaves nothing in the body that needs a cell. The ET was often supplied with the multicoated MC Helios-44M-4, a 58mm f/2, and plenty of buyers want that lens more than the camera behind it. Shoot it wide open against busy foliage and the background starts to swirl. With the auto diaphragm you focus at full aperture and the blades close when you fire. Some versions skipped that mechanism and came with the preset Helios-44-2, so you focus, turn a second ring to stop down, then shoot. Check which kind you have before you blame the lens for a dark finder.

Flash is where the ET shows its age. X sync is 1/30 and nothing faster, and at 1/30 in full sun even f/16 on the Helios lets in too much light for most film, so fill flash is only practical in shade or dull light. The selenium cell is the other worry. These cells have been taking light since the 1980s, and many now read low or not at all. A reading from the Zone Light Meter app replaces a tired cell without changing how you work, because the ET never coupled its meter anyway. You were always carrying the numbers over by hand.

Today the ET sits at the very bottom of the M42 market. It's the body that shows up in a box lot with a Helios still on the front. The obvious alternatives are the Praktica MTL or a Pentax Spotmatic, both of which meter through the lens. Against them the ET offers sheer numbers. With millions made, donor bodies turn up everywhere, and a fully mechanical camera with no battery to go flat is about the cheapest way for a student to start shooting M42 glass.

One habit to learn from the Zenit-E family: wind first, then set the speed. Turning the dial on an uncocked shutter is how these cameras get hurt. Cock it, pick the speed, and the rest of the camera is about as forgiving as Soviet engineering gets.