The Russian FED 4 camera was extremely robust, even after me, and my dad before me, dropped it many many times on rocks.


On Sun, 03 Jan 2021 10:22:01 -0000, Brian Gaff (Sofa) wrote:

This is not a new thing though is it? Back in the days of the USSR we used
to get a lot of stuff like cassette machines and radios and even black and
whit tvs from Soviet bloc countries. Some were OK, but a little fragile but
one I remember made by a company in the Czech area called Tesla had a
great design and a great sound as a recorder player that ran form the mains.
The sad part was that it seemed to have been manufactured by idiots in that
all the riveted bits were loose, the flywheel was not on straight and the
motor and induction type, was doubling as the mains transformer and
basically over a three month period it gradually fell to bits chewed tape
and finally the brackets that held the piano keys fell of completely.

Like most things, a lot of things are designed well but cheap manufacture
and lack of quality control and corner cutting on components ruin them.
Brian