List Price: $754.60
Sale Price: $409.95
Today's Bonus: 46% Off
This camera system can be a good choice for an amateur who wants to shoot medium format film using a modular-system camera and doesn't want to shell out for far more expensive alternatives such as the Hasselblad (but it is not robust enough for hard professional use). The design actually is a rip-off from an early model Hasselblad. Like a Hasselblad, the Kiev 88 has replaceable film backs, replaceable viewers (including both a waist-level viewfinder and a pentaprism finder with a through-the-lens exposure meter), and interchangeable lenses. All are mounted on a boxy aluminum body.
The principal difference from modern Hasselblads is that the Kiev 88 used a focal plane shutter in the camera body. Hasselblads employ leaf shutters in each lens. There are advantages to the Hasselblad arrangement, but it makes each lens much more expensive. There are many fine lenses, mostly used, available for the Kiev 88 including German-made Zeiss lenses in various focal lengths, for a small fraction of the cost of comparable lenses for a Hasselblad. As a result, you can assemble a multi-lens Kiev 88 system much more cheaply than a Hasselblad one. This model Kiev 88 comes with a Russian-made lens designed to the same specs as the Zeiss Planar 80mm lens that is standard on a Hasselblad. In my own experience, the Russian lens produces excellent results.
Quality control at the Ukrainian factory making these cameras was not up to Western standards, but an after-market developed to bring the cameras up to spec and make some other improvements. This camera appears to have the upgrade, performed by a Ukrainian outfit named Hartblei.
There is a learning curve in operating this camera, but the same is true of other film cameras without automatic features, such as automatic focus and exposure control. You need to know your way around film cameras generally to take this one on. Operating it is a much different experience from operating some all-automatic digital model.
But for amateurs who are still attached to film and aren't afraid of manual camera operation, this could be a good choice especially if you want a modular system. Medium format film can produce very fine images -much superior to 35mm film because the larger negative (or transparency) records much more visual information.
0 comments:
Post a Comment