Anyone familiar with this (it’s coming up at an auction on Friday)?
I collect cameras and I know after the war the Soviets disassembled portions of the Zeiss works in Jena and relocated them to the Soviet Union (primarily Kiev) and produced copies of Contax cameras and Zeiss lenses.
They also reverse engineered other western camera brands and made copies of them (with varying degrees of quality control). But I didn’t know they did it with survey instruments and this looks suspiciously western.
I have seen a few of the Russian Wild knockoffs for auction. I love how they even copied the paint color for them. Cold war beauties! Not sure how well their QC was compared to the originals from Switzerland. I have been hoping to find one cheap sometime to play around with. That one looks like the T-3 so it could be a decent instrument.
May have to make a bid if it stays reasonable.
The knock-off cameras are the same situation...if the QC was good, then you get 90% of the performance at 30% of the price. And the lenses are really good for what they are (copies of the best lens design from a couple of decades before they were made).
I have a Contex knock-off and the only real difference between the Soviet and German versions are $100 versus $500 on the current market.
