Sport (camera) on:
[Wikipedia]
[Google]
[Amazon]
The "Sport" camera is the series production model of a prototype camera called Gelveta. The Gelveta was designed and built by A. O. Gelgar between 1934 and 1935. It is the earliest known production 
35mm 35 mm may refer to:
Film
* 135 film, a type of still photography format commonly referred to as 35 mm film
* 35 mm movie film, a type of motion picture film stock
* 35MM, a "musical exhibition" by Ryan Scott Oliver that features music ...
SLR camera
In photography, a single-lens reflex camera (SLR) is a type of camera that uses a mirror and prism system to allow photographers to view through the lens and see exactly what will be captured. SLRs became the dominant design for professional a ...
ever to be built, but fewer than 320 examples were made. The actual launch date of the "Sport" is somewhat uncertain, however it was in series production by 1936 and must undoubtedly be one of the two earliest generally available SLR cameras using the 35mm film format, the other being the German Ihagee Kine Exakta
The Kine Exakta was the first 35mm single-lens reflex (SLR) still camera in regular production. It was presented by Ihagee Kamerawerk Steenbergen GmbH, Dresden at the Leipziger Frühjahrsmesse in March 1936. The Exakta name had already been use ...
, launched in 1936. It was manufactured by the Soviet
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...
camera factory Gosudarstvennyi Optiko-Mekhanicheskii Zavod, The State Optical-Mechanical Factory in Leningrad. GOMZ for short. The camera name is engraved in Cyrillic
The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Ea ...
on the finder housing above the lens: ''„Спорm“''. The manufacturer's prism logo in gold on black with the factory initials ГОМЗ (GOMZ) is shown behind a circular magnifying window on the top left camera front. An estimated number of 19,000 cameras were made before Leningrad
Saint Petersburg, formerly known as Petrograd and later Leningrad, is the List of cities and towns in Russia by population, second-largest city in Russia after Moscow. It is situated on the Neva, River Neva, at the head of the Gulf of Finland ...
was besieged in September 1941 and suffered heavy damage. The design concept was not continued later.
The development of the "Sport" was a lengthy process. It was predeceeded by the "Filmanka" SLR designed in Russia by A. A. Min as early as 1931. The "Filmanka" was transferred to GOMZ and may have inspired the pre-production Gelveta design, which turned into the "Sport" production model. The B and 1/25 to 1/500 second focal-plane shutter
In camera design, a focal-plane shutter (FPS) is a type of photographic shutter that is positioned immediately in front of the focal plane of the camera, that is, right in front of the photographic film or image sensor.
Two-curtain shutters ...
employs a pair of metal plates, which form a vertically rising slit during exposure. The slit width determines the exposure. The shutter operation incorporates a quick-rising non-returning reflex mirror. The combined shutter speed dial and wind-on knob, situated on the right-hand side, is stationary during exposure. The film transport is from cassette to cassette, no rewind is provided. The original pair of cassettes would take enough film for fifty exposures. A manual-reset frame counter is at the base of the wind-on knob. The camera has an eye-level vertical viewfinder for looking down onto the focusing screen
A focusing screen is a flat translucent material, either a ground glass or Fresnel lens, found in a system camera that allows the user of the camera to preview the framed image in a viewfinder. Often, focusing screens are available in variants wi ...
, as well as a built-in direct vision "action finder". The integral camera base and back is removed for film loading. The camera was designed to take interchangeable bayonet mounted lenses, but the only lens
A lens is a transmissive optical device that focuses or disperses a light beam by means of refraction. A simple lens consists of a single piece of transparent material, while a compound lens consists of several simple lenses (''elements'') ...
available was the Industar "И-10 1 : 3, 5 F = 5 cm" lens. Except for a few examples there is no serial number on the camera body, the lens serial number is used for identification. The camera bayonet lens mount
A lens mount is an interface – mechanical and often also electrical – between a photographic camera body and a lens. It is a feature of camera systems where the System camera, body allows interchangeable lenses, most usually the rangefinder ...
incorporates the focusing helix with an infinity
Infinity is something which is boundless, endless, or larger than any natural number. It is denoted by \infty, called the infinity symbol.
From the time of the Ancient Greek mathematics, ancient Greeks, the Infinity (philosophy), philosophic ...
catch, and the mount itself is similar to that for the Zeiss Ikon
Zeiss ( ; ) is a German manufacturer of optical systems and optoelectronics, founded in Jena, Germany, in 1846 by optician Carl Zeiss. Together with Ernst Abbe (joined 1866) and Otto Schott (joined 1884) he laid the foundation for today's mu ...
Contax
Contax (stylised as CONTAX in the Yashica/Kyocera era) began as a German camera model in the Zeiss Ikon line in 1932, and later became a brand name. The early cameras were among the finest in the world, typically featuring high quality Carl Zeis ...
.{{cite book, title=Russian and Soviet Cameras, author=Jean Loup Princelle, publisher=Hove Foto Books, year=1995, isbn=1-874031-02-9
References