![]() It’s incredibly solid in both feel and construction, but has all the sophistication of an Eliza Doolittle. The Helios’ build quality ticks all the Soviet lens boxes, for better and worse. Why? It followed the same formula every other lackluster Soviet lens followed it was a yet another Zeiss knockoff (aping the Zeiss Biotar 58mm f/2), it came attached to a half-broken camera, and it was produced by a factory known for its loose manufacturing tolerances, KMZ (Krasnogorsky Zavod), famous for producing the Industar and Jupiter lenses found on the Leica copies known as FED and Zorki, and since those two lenses ended up being mostly unremarkable, I wasn’t scrambling to get my hands on a Helios.Īnd right I was, at least at first. I quickly unscrewed the Helios from the Zenit and stuck it onto my resident M42 shooter, the elegant Pentax SV. It came attached to a Zenit TTL which I wanted to test, but whose busted light meter disqualified it for review ( that job fell to Jeb). Like many Soviet lenses, the Helios 44M waltzed (or hopaked?) into my life unannounced. But there’s one lens in my collection that quietly and consistently reminds me that I don’t know it all, and that lens is the Helios 44M 58mm f/2. ![]() I’ve come to the conclusion that despite their internet reputations for being amazing dark horses, most of these lenses are just sub-par copies of German ones. Our frequent coverage of lenses and cameras from the former Soviet Union might make us seem like ardent fans of the subgenre, but I can assure you it’s not the case (true at least for the members of the CP writing staff who aren’t named Jeb).
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