Kiev 4 AM

The Kiev 4 AM was one of the last range finder cameras produced by the Kiev-Arsenal company. It was produced between 1979 and 1986. The 35mm range finder Kiev cameras were clones of the pre-war Contax II and Contax III cameras.

I got this camera a while ago off of ebay and its just been lying around ever since. I finally got round to trying it out recently and was really pleased with the results. The Kiev 4 AM is a completely manual camera, you have to set the shutter speed yourself, which ranges from B to 1/1000. The Camera comes with a 1:1.8/53 mm Helios-103 lens, which has an aperture range of 1.8 to 22. There is a hot shoe and a self timer, but mine is a bit temperamental and doesn’t always would but that doesn’t bother me too much. It doesn’t have a light meter, but i got myself a cheap one off of ebay, which is a lot easier to carry around with it instead of another camera that does have one.

It took me a while to figure out how to open the camera to get the film in, because it doesn’t open up like a regular 35mm camera, there are little latches at the bottom of the camera that you turn and the whole back comes off in order to up the film it the camera. Once you figure out how to use the camera (which doesn’t take that long but didn’t help that the instruction book was in Russian) it is a fairly simple camera to use, and i really enjoyed seeing what this camera could do.

I can’t wait to get another roll of film into this camera and taking it out again. For more information on Kiev range finder cameras i would recommend visiting this web page it gives a whole load of information about the history of the Kiev cameras.

written by laineyrocks on 2009-08-13 #gear #rangefinder #review #soviet-camera #kiev-4-am