Zenit-E can be called the most famous Soviet camera: even now it is familiar to everyone who is involved in photography. This camera is well known abroad as well.

The total circulation of Zenit-E, which was produced simultaneously in Krasnogorsk near Moscow and Vileika in Belarus, by the end of production in 1988 exceeded seven million. At the same time, this world’s most massive SLR camera did not shine with the latest technical solutions at the time of its birth in 1965. The shutter was inherited almost unchanged from the first Soviet “Leica” of the Kharkov plant, and the viewfinder still “cut off” a third of the area of the future frame. The secret of the camera’s survival, which is still easy to find at any flea market, even in Western Europe, is its amazing simplicity and the design for manufacturability. In the USSR the camera was the cheapest of the DSLRs and cost only 100 rubles.

Abroad, it did not deserve the attention of professional photographers, but for amateurs it was a real find. For the money that Zenit-E cost in the shops of the main importer TOE Ltd., in the West it was possible to buy only a ‘fancy’ point-and-shoot camera
with a plastic lens. Export version of Zenit was equipped with a good copy of the German Zeiss Biotar, which originally cost as much as five of these cameras. Many foreign amateur photographers still fondly remember their first ‘DSLR’ because of the Iron Curtain, and in the USSR this camera became a ‘ticket to life’ for many professional photographers.