>>4016624Your best option are "prosumer" cameras, Kiev-15 and 20. There's also Kiev-10, but it has a selenium cell light meter, which is dead by this point.
I have both Kiev-15 and 20 (and I got them for free, lol)
Kiev-15 uses it's own lens mount, "Kiev-Automat" which is used only on K15 and K10. It has a shutter priority mode (K10 was the first SLR in the world to have this feature), shutter speeds up to 1/1000 and a very interesting design of the shutter. The viewfinder is small, only slightly bigger than on Zenit, but it's pretty bright. The downsides are:
1)It's pretty heavy and bulky. Nothing too crazy, but it isn't the lightest camera
2)There's not many lenses to choose from. Kit- Helios-81Automat, Mir wide angle and Granit zoom. They are very cheap, so there's a bright side, but still, only 3 lenses.
I got my K15 right before the war, so I couldn't service it where I usually do, on Arsenal factory, so I can't say much about it.
Kiev-20 is probably the best soviet 35mm SLR. Kiev-19 is basically castrated Kiev-20, so 20 is the same, but much better. Shutter speeds from 1 to 1/1000s, metering up to iso 3200(ГOCT 2000), multi-exposure button. This may not sound impressive, but by the soviet standards, it is. And it costs less than 100$, so it's still a pretty good camera.
The most interesting compact cameras are LK-A(LOMO Compact-Avtomat), Elikon-Autofocus and Kiev-35A.
LK-A is so notoriously bad it started the whole Lomography thing, Elikon has autofocus (Surprise!), the one and only soviet camera that has it, and Kiev-35A is basically Minox-35, but slightly better.
There are miniature cameras-Kiev Vega, Kiev 30 and Kiev 303, but they aren't very interesting. Still considered spy devices in North Korea tho.
TLRs- well, there are Lubitels. There is a saying that roughly translates to "Lubitel is for those who love masochism" ("lubit'"=to love, but jokes are not funny if you have to explain them, are they?)
