LOMO Lubitel 166 Universal
Russian Camera Roulette
All USSR cameras have some sort of defects right off the production line or from years of use due to poor build quality and low durability.
Buying an USSR camera means playing the Russian Camera Roulette, except the chambers are all filled with bullets, some are fatal, and you always lose.
I ate a fatal bullet from the Russian Camera Roulette for the first time. If you come in expecting a proper review of a Lubitel 166 Universal (166U), you can stop reading. I am just ranting here.
This year my GAS is nowhere better than the last. One tired night after work, I was browsing eBay and saw a Lubitel 166U, looking to be in good condition (due to my lack of understanding on the camera and tricky camera angle). Before I knew it, I've placed the order.
After 3 weeks it arrived. At first everything seemed fine. I've fed my confirmation bias with ample of online review such that despite it's hard to focus and is only a triplet (triplet can be sharp though), it'll be fine.
Yeah everything people said online are probably right.
Russian cameras suffer from build quality issue, and due to the use of cheap materials they don't usually last as long. Moskva-5 was CLA'd but edge sharpness concerns me, AGAT 18K was missing viewfinder frame lines, and this Lubitel 166U is the worst.
Oh and the FEDs, I knew they are somewhat broken before stupidly placing the order. At the end they were all devastatingly broken…
Back to my copy of Lubitel 166U.
The camera felt all light and plasticky, which I am ok with, considering how my wrist hurts after carrying around the 2kg Mamiya Press for a day.
The top takes a bit of force to pop open, and inside is the viewfinder. There's also a magnifying lens for focusing. Without the magnifying lens it's nearly impossible to focus. When turning the viewing lens, the image only at the center circle will become blurred or clear, to show whether the lenses are in focus. This is a f/2.8 lens with significant vignetting, and the corners are not visible from viewfinder when viewing for 6x6 format.
There was a roll of old film inside I plan to develop some day with stand development or simply D-76 with the magic number of 6 minutes. Inside there's a 6x4.5 mask (if the previous owners haven't lost it), which masks out part of the 6x6 imaging area, allowing 4 more shots to be taken compared to shooting 6x6 format. The mask is simple pressed sheet metal with sharp corners, which would easily scratch the film or worse, poke into the backing paper, jamming the film advance mechanism. That time I had to open the back of the camera to loosen the backing paper and ended up losing a few shots.
There are 5 levers on the lens for cocking shutter, releasing shutter, changing aperture, changing shutter speed, and setting timer. The timer of course doesn't work and I had to nudge it back like the broken timer on Ansco Memar. Only the aperture lever takes up a rectangular shape, the other levers have example same appearance. There were multiple times I mistook the shutter release as the shutter cocking level. One time I was cocking the shutter too hard, my finger slipped and immediately hit the shutter release right below it, misfiring the shot.
Now the worst part. This camera is made of plastic. Even the synchronization mechanism between the viewing and taking lens is composed of simply 2 plastic gear rings. The gear tooth could easily be damaged over time and immediately the viewing and taking lens would be out of sync. For SLR type and viewfinder type medium format camera, only the taking lens need to be realigned. But on TLR, viewing and taking lens could be out of alignment, or the markings on viewing lens could be misaligned, or all of them misaligned.
Even though I have pushed my Shanghai GP3 film by 2 stops to ISO 400, there are still cases when I need to shoot at maximum aperture f/4.5 when indoor. Almost unfailably those shots miss the focus. Partly because the lenses are misaligned and partly because focusing is really hard on this camera. I'd prefer the old-fashioned split image focusing on my rangerfinders…though Moskva-5's rangerfinder is still somewhat off at f/3.5. Russian Camera Roulette.
This has became a nice looking paperweight just like the Ansco Memar at first. To be fair, shooting at high aperture stop, the depth of field may happen to cover the bit I am focusing, with luck. Still, on medium format I'd expect high quality output for important shoots. Re-aligning the viewing and taking lens will become possible once I have got hold of 60× magnifying glass I bought online.
The surest way to get a good camera is to buy the most popular cameras, even though it's the most boring way as well. Anyway thanks to Lubitel 166 Universal, I know to avoid other TLRs because the misalignment issue and difficulty in focusing are some deal breakers—I am still eying for a medium format SLR say a Bronica/Kowa/Pentax/Mamiya. Or I just buy good digital lenses.
