VOMZ Mir-1B 37mm f/2.8

Bright overcast, f/8, focus parked at about six metres, a Zenit hanging at chest height on a crowded market street. Set up like that, everything from roughly three metres to infinity is acceptably sharp, and that is the job the Mir-1B does best: the one job where its biggest flaw stops mattering. You choose the aperture once, close the lens down, and stop thinking about it. Nobody ends up waiting on an automatic diaphragm, because this lens never had one.

The B in the name is the Cyrillic letter V, which is why sellers list it just as often as Mir-1V. It stands for Vologda, home of the VOMZ factory that built this black version. The glass is the same 37mm f/2.8 design as the original Mir-1, a retrofocus formula derived from the Zeiss Jena Flektogon, here housed in a black barrel with a standard M42x1 thread and the usual 45.5 mm register. Any M42 body takes it, and adapting it to mirrorless is trivial. Those two extra millimetres over a true 35 give a slightly tighter frame; a doorway or a café table fills it without the edges running away from you.

Don't expect much polish at f/2.8. The centre is usable, the corners soften and darken, and you should expect them to improve noticeably by f/5.6 to f/8. At the street settings above it gives plenty of detail for a 35mm negative. Hard backlight is another matter, since an older design like this can veil and flare, so shade the front element with a hood or your hand. Background blur is not its strength either. A 37mm at f/2.8 separates little at normal distances, and what does fall out of focus can look busy.

The real catch is the diaphragm. It is a preset design: you set the chosen aperture on the preset ring, focus at full aperture, then turn the other ring to close down before you shoot. There is no pin and no auto stop-down, so on a Zenit with through-the-lens metering you meter stopped down, through a viewfinder that grows noticeably gloomy past f/8. Slow, deliberate work hardly notices. Anything that moves fast at wider apertures leaves you a step behind lenses that close for you.

What this version did change is the filter thread. The silver Mir-1 used a less common size; the Mir-1B takes ordinary M49x0.75, one of the most familiar threads on M42 lenses, so a yellow, an orange, or an ND from the drawer screws straight on. If you meter with Zone Light Meter, enter the filter in the app and its factor is folded into the reading, which spares you working out a red filter's three stops in your head while the light shifts.

Today it suits people who want to work the way the opening scene describes. The East German Flektogon it was derived from is a separate lens with its own history. Among its stablemates, the faster Mir-24M adds an automatic diaphragm, which matters if you shoot wide open and want a bright finder right up to the moment of exposure. Buyers who pick the Mir-1B anyway generally know they will be closing the aperture by hand, and for zone-focused street work at f/8 that costs them very little.