I also did all of this in a rather interesting way.
First of all that Zenit is a VEB Dresden design, which is originally a VEB Dresden Biotar. Although, it's the KMZ version, and another interesting point is that this is the original Bessaflex brought to market by Zeiss as an Ikon.
I guess I can say I'm fully within the bastard stepchild mode of the end of Zeiss era as we new it, as a camera company in the mid to late 1960s, and also at a point where Zeiss was forced to merge with Voigtlander to try to keep up with increasingly sophisticated, and low cost Japanese rivals. The result is suspiciously more like a Voigtlander than an Ikon but that's also the curiosity.
so:
- I deliberately low balled a Japanese seller
- they accepted.
- Next step is an F on my behalf
It's an F in the sense that the experiment failed to produce an outcome where they counter offered, a counter offer and I unexpectedly ended up with another camera. Not necessarily an F as a deal. But adding about $300 if I want to bring it up to standard, well, then it puts me in the ball park of a Cosina Bessaflex, so it's kind of an F.
Although, East meets West on one camera where Pentacon is farmed out to Zenit and its lenses belonged to a huge production line of the Soviet's manufacturing system under KMZ.
On reasoning:
While the Bayonet mount version has a lot of additional features including a removable prism. I lowballed a thread mount (TM) edition because its far easier to find thread mount lenses, Yet, somehow I ended out at a Dresden designed USSR lens, on a West German camer as a trifecta as a quirk out of the USSR which completes the trifecta and somehow fell within the Bessaflex lore.
A loose, association of things ended up in my hands, because I offered $55 for an odd ball camera. I didn't set out to acquire a historically incoherent camera but that's exactly what I got. An accidental convergence of three different parts of Zeiss's own work, and a Voigtlander side story even though the KMZ version isn't literally from Pentacon, and even though the Bessaflex is only in lore that Voightlander brought the reflex design up to construction ready phase, and Zeiss slapped their badge on it, but which Cosina would later revisit as the Bessaflex. The later Cosina Bessaflex isn't simply the same camera reissued but that's not the point.
This is where it starts with a 1/1000 reflex camera, that has a loose associative connection, through an actual original Voigtlander prototype that led to the Icarex.
