The Zorki 4 was possibly the most popular of all

Zorki Zorki (russian: Зоркий, meaning sharp-sighted) is the name of a series of 35mm rangefinder cameras manufactured in the Soviet Union between 1948 and 1978. The Zorki was a product of the Krasnogorsk Mechanical Factory (KMZ), which also pr ...

cameras, with 1,715,677 cameras made by the KMZ factory in Krasnogorsk,

Russia Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a List of transcontinental countries, transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia, Northern Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the ...

. The Zorki 4 was also the first of the Zorki cameras to be exported in large numbers to

the west West is a cardinal direction or compass point. West or The West may also refer to: Geography and locations Global context * The Western world * Western culture and Western civilization in general * The Western Bloc, countries allied with NATO ...

. It is a fully manual camera, and does not have a lightmeter. An additional lightmeter may be added by the cold shoe. When the Zorki 4

rangefinder A rangefinder (also rangefinding telemeter, depending on the context) is a device used to measure distances to remote objects. Originally optical devices used in surveying, they soon found applications in other fields, such as photography an ...

was introduced in 1956, its contemporaries included the Zorki S, Zorki 2S,

FED 2 The FED 2 was a 35 mm rangefinder camera introduced in 1955 by FED. The name of FED comes from the initial of Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky. Major features The FED 2 is a new design that is quite different from the FED 1. It has a longer rangef ...

Leica M3 The Leica M3 is a 35 mm rangefinder camera by Ernst Leitz GmbH (now Leica Camera AG), introduced in 1954. It was a new starting point for Leitz, which until then had only produced screw-mount Leica cameras that were incremental improvements to i ...

(introduced two years before), Leica IIIg, Nikon S2, Canon VT, and Canon L1. The Zorki 4's production run outlasted all of them. When it morphed into the Zorki 4K by 1973, its contemporaries included the FED 4b, Leica M4 and M5,

Nikon F2 The Nikon F2 is a professional-level, interchangeable lens, 35mm format, 35 mm film, single-lens reflex (SLR) camera. It was manufactured by the Japanese optics company Nippon Kogaku K. K. (Nikon Corporation since 1988) in Japan from September 1 ...

, and

Canon F-1 The Canon F-1 is a 35 mm single-lens reflex camera produced by Canon of Japan from March 1971 until the end of 1981, at which point it had been superseded by the New F-1 launched earlier that year. The Canon FD lens mount was introduced a ...

and Canon Canonet QL 17 GIII. The Zorki 4 is essentially a Zorki 3S with a

self timer A self timer is a device on a camera that gives a delay between pressing the shutter release and the shutter's firing. It is most commonly used to let the photographer to take a photo of themselves (often with a group of other people), hence t ...

. It retained all of the features and strong points of the 3S. The early bodies have a vulcanite body covering, engraved shutter speeds, and strap lugs. Later bodies have fabric covering and the shutter speeds (1/60 and 1/30 instead of 1/50 and 1/25) are silk-screened. By the mid-1960s, the strap lugs had disappeared.

Variants

The Zorki 4 came in 2 variants the original which uses a thumb wheel to advance to film and cock the shutter. The Zorki 4k included a wind lever for easier operation.

Operation

As with other Soviet-era rangefinders, the shutter speed selector rotates when the shutter is released, and should not be changed until after the shutter has been cocked. If the shutter speed is changed without cocking the shutter first, the setting pin can be broken when the film is advanced.

Variants

Operation

External links