Let Us Praise Crap: Lubitel 166U

January 30, 2009

I was initially excited when I heard about the new Lubitel 166U+.

I’ve owned a Lubitel 166U for a number of years and while I’ve enjoyed our time together there are a number of issues that grates on my nerves.  Any relationship that brings you into a close working situation with someone for any amount of time is liable to expose both their good and bad qualities.   My time with the Lubitel has brought me some limited delight and much heartbreak.  Like a lover who occasionally once in a while gets drunk and does this fantastic thing with her… um… you get the idea…  anyway… I have a lot of bad negatives but there’s a few that I’m very fond of.

The reason I picked up the Lubitel from a Ukranian dealer off of ebay for $20 (with $30 shipping and mishandling) in 2004 or so was that I had been working with 35mm for a while and had heard of this great stuff called 120 film and wanted to try my hand at a Twin Lens Reflex.

Bigger Negative! Retro Appeal! Sexy Styling! Big Prints!

I’m not very bright and I really didn’t have anyone to talk to about this sort of thing so I ended up purchasing a Soviet era plastic-less-than-fantastic brick with decent exposure control, a really horrible lens, and a focusing system that was legendary in its inability to do what it claimed to do which was FOCUS.   At the time I thought it was a much smarter buy than a Holga.  After all, the holga had two exposure settings while the Lubitel offered a full range of f-stops from f/4.5 to f/22 as well as shutter speeds from B to 1/250.  On top of that the Lubitel could actually focus.  It had a pop up magnifier to assist you with critical focusing after all.

Lies, all lies.

In the defense of the Lubitel, it does indeed have a pop up magnifier to assist you with critial focusing.   It just doesn’t work as you can see from the below photo.  I got the steps in sharp, beautiful focus but that’s not what I was trying to get into focus…

My problems with the camera can be summarized as:

• The focusing screen only offers 80% coverage of the actual scene.
• The little focusing spot? The one that looks like a bird shat in your viewfinder? Purely cosmetic.
• Using a knob for film advance is a bit painful for someone whose profession often leads to carpal tunnel syndrome.
• While the focusing lens does provide distance markings, they’re approximate at best
• That little red window on the back of the camera that you use to ensure that you’ve wound to the next frame is difficult to see through and becomes completely opaque by twilight.
• The close focusing distance is about 1.3 to 1.7 meters.

To be fair it was a $20 so the knob winding and the little red window that goes along with that winding system might be asking for a little much out of such a cheap camera.

The advantages of the camera are that it does offer a full range of exposures, its easy to load, its proved to be extremely durable, it has a PC socket (disguised as a little metal rod instead of the recessed socket we’re used to), it takes a cable release, and it weights next to nothing.   The one thing I ask out of a camera is that it does what I tell it to do.  In the case of the Lubitel it succeeds in the exposure realm but fails in focusing.

Focusing a Lubitel could be called an artform.  Its more a matter of throwing darts while blindfolded.  The smaller the f-stop, the bigger the dartboard.   So when stopped down to f/16 or f/22 you can rely on nearly everything being in focus.   Putting a roll of 400 ISO film and walking around in bright daylight will allow you to use these small apertures if desired.   As the Lubitel 166U offers a PC socket it can be used in the studio if you’d like to experiment with low quality lenses that offer you plenty of vignetting without having to mess around in photoshop.  The drawback of using the Lubitel in the studio is the close focusing distance of 1.7 meters.  Even cranking your lights up all the way to get a small aperture to get more depth of field will not allow you to get that close to the subject if you want a tightly composed frame.

With an 75mm lens you’re limited to head and half-torso portraits as seen above.  This was taken about a meter away at around f/13 using a single light.  I wanted to be close to crop out a cluttered background but as you can see the backdrop is in sharp focus but the model is blurry.   She’s pretty damn cute anyway but I would have liked to have gotten her in sharper focus.

For landscapes this is obviously not a problem.

Now let’s return to the new Lubitel 166U+ recently released by the Lomo Society.   The promised features include an improved viewfinder, the promise of accurate zone focusing (doing away with the little pop up magnifier), and a closer focusing distance of .8 meters (about 2 1/2 feet or so).   They also offer the ability to use 35mm film to do a panoramic shot and replace the PC socket with a hotshoe.   Personally I would have preferred the PC socket but most people use hotshoe flashes these days, especially with little toy cameras like this one.

And finally the reason why I’m less than sanguine about this: the price point.

THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTY FUCKING DOLLARS.

I’d say pardon my French but I don’t know how to say fuck in French.  I’d say it in Spanish but I can’t remember how to conjugate chingar these days.

I realize that the Lomo Society is a boutique but that’s absurd.  Even with a redesigned camera that addresses the major flaws in the original that’s way off.  Seagull puts out a TLR with better features, better glass, and the same crappy build quality for about that price.  New.   More importantly, you can pick up a much loved Yashica Mat 124 for about a hundred dollars less in extremely good condition.   The Yashica has great build quality and delivers extremely good optics and performance for its price.   A friend of Angel’s raved about how much he loved his Yashica until someone mistook it for an ashtry during a party.  Or turned it into a bong.  Or something.  These things happen.

There are also related products like Pentacon 6 which is a SLR with an optional waist level viewfinder.   For $370 you can pick up a kit which includes a rebuilt Pentacon 6 with a prism viewfinder as well as the waist level finder from a reputable German manufacturer.   If you’re interested in entering the medium format world, there are better options than the Lubitel 166U+ no matter how you define the word “better”.

If you’re in the market for a crap TLR that performs pretty well I’d recommend the Lubitel 166U (not the new lomo fashion accessory, the original craptastic one) with the reservations I described above.   Its around $99 or less on ebay from Russian dealers, some of which are prefectly reputable.   You can probably find dealers based in the US as well.   Dropping $350 for a plastic camera that has a reputation for being very difficult to focus is not a good investment.    At $150 or $200 I might consider it as it does appear to solve many of my problems with the original 166U.  But not at $350.

The attraction of lomo was always limited quality at a limited price.  When you price a product that only offers entry level quality (with a few gee-wizz features thrown in) above another product that actually works far better it shines a very uncomfortably bright light on its flaws.   The Holga is total crap but I can pick one up for $25.  At that price its charming.   For $100 its the start of a relationship destined to end with one party being thrown under the wheels of a truck.

Posted in Product Review