Konvas was around for many decades and they made a lot of different cameras over the years. Some are more sophisticated than others.
I own a Konvas 1KCP which is about the crudest thing they have made. No registration pin, so it will work with western film without modification. DC motor with a rheostat and tach for speed, so basically no accurate speed control. There are synch motors available for a few hundred dollars but the camera is still very noisy. The DC motor is very underengineered and has less than great reliability, so there is an optional crank available in the kit as a backup. The magazines are peculiar and take nonstandard Russian cores. You can load film on normal cores with core adaptors but if you do you can only get about 300 feet into a 400 ft. mag. They will wind film emulsion-out so warn the lab about that. Reflex finder is excellent although they are full silent frame and you will have to put marks on the groundglass yourself for Academy frame and for 1:1.185 frames. These take OCT-8 mount lenses and there are actually a lot of older but good lenses out there available in that mount as long as you don't mind lightly-coated primes. There are some zooms available but they are expensive and poor. It is possible to mill the front of the turret down to add a Nikon mount but I am not sure whether it is worth it. I got mine because I was on a shoot in Kiev a few years ago and was talking to our fixer and said that had wanted one of them, and he took me to a huge open air flea market where a fellow sold me one with a bad motor but a nice set of lenses for $200. Since then I have actually shot a good bit of film with the thing and it feels very crude but has really been quite pleasant to use once I got the hang of some of the oddities. It's interesting to see how the thing is engineered... the magazines look like they were bashed out of metal with a rock, but the gate is beautiful, very precise workmanship. They spent some real time on things that counted and then everything else was done as cheaply as possible with as little attention to detail as could be managed. --scott _______________________________________________ FrameWorks mailing list FrameWorks@jonasmekasfilms.com https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks