KMZ Company
Russian full name: Красногорский Механический Завод
English name: Krasnogorsk Mechanical Plant
Chinese name: Krasnogorsk Optical and Mechanical Factory
Located in the northwestern suburbs of Moscow in Russia, KMZ was a very influential optical factory during the Soviet era.
Located in the northwestern suburbs of Moscow, Russia, KMZ is a very influential optical factory in the Soviet era, built in 1942, when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the early main production of troops in need of optical instruments, binoculars, rangefinders, etc., after World War II, the Soviets under the War Reparations Act to obtain the equipment and raw materials of the Zeiss Ikon plant, all of which were shipped back to their country in the Moscow grouping station for a few months before being sent back to the United States. After a few months at the Moscow grouping station, it was distributed to various places. KMZ got the lenses and everything for manufacturing optical instruments, and began to produce matching L39-port (FED, Zorki series) and Kiev-port (Kiev series) parabolic lenses, among which the more famous ones are the Jupiter series and the Helios series. 1947-1948, a number of FED In 1947-1948, a number of FED cameras were also produced, labeled with the KMZ factory label and called FED-KMZ, which was later improved to FED-Zorki and renamed Zorki in 1949, and then gradually formed a series with better performance compared to the FED series.In 1951, based on the Zorki 1C body, with the addition of a reflex mirror and prismatic viewfinder, the Zenit 1 was born, which was the first Soviet DSLR camera, using the same lens as the Zorki body. The Zenit 1 was the first SLR camera in the USSR, using the same M39 threaded lens interface as the Zorki body, but due to the different image plane positioning distances between the SLR camera and the side-axis camera, the lenses could not be used universally, and the KMZ lengthened the image distance of the original side-axis lenses to produce the first batch of SLR lenses with the M39 threaded lens, and then improved it to the standard threaded lens interface of the M42, and it has been continued to this day. It can be said that most of the SLR camera lenses in the former Soviet Union were first produced by KMZ, and then dispersed to various optical factories in the USSR, in which KMZ played a guiding role. In addition to Zorki and Zenit, KMZ also produced Photosniper and Horizon cameras. Today KMZ is a conglomerate that produces night vision goggles, binoculars, medical equipment, and digital DC products in addition to DSLRs, and Zenit DSLRs are probably the only brand of M42-interface cameras still in production.
First early logo (used until about 1950)
Second logo (1950s to 1970s)
Current logo (started in the 1970s)
Current corporate logo registered to expand into the Western market
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