I have a few soviet cameras. What stands out the most is their sheer heft. I have a Fed-4, a Fed-5, a Lubitel and three original, marked-in-cyrillic Lomo LC-As

I have a few soviet cameras. What stands out the most is their sheer heft. I have a Fed-4, a Fed-5, a Lubitel and three original, marked-in-cyrillic Lomo LC-As (not the clone Lomography Inc. marketed later). When I was doing film photography I also used to have a Diana (shitty but on purpose Chinese 120/medium-format camera) and a (mystery Russian beyond my ability to read Cyrillic) medium-format camera that needed a tripod out of how heavy it was. Finally, I had a consumer-grade Canon. The Feds weighed like double what the Canon packed with two extra lenses did. LC-As are not that heavy, but the front-panel is finicky and I feel pained to put the thing in a backpack. As it turns out, the cameras I take out the most are (Chinese) Vivitar Ultra-Wide and Slim and the unmarked fixed-focus camera my family usedwhen I was a child. Before you buy a Soviet camera: these things are heavy! Edit: reading the comments I remembered another two: an Agat half-frame camera and another one I-can't-read-the cyrllic-from half-frame that has a huge thick light sensor around the lens and so it has auto-exposure. The former is plastic and not too heavy (but the exposure controls are hard to use, and because it's a half-frame it can't be as forgiving as the wide-aperture lenses in fixed-focus cameras). The latter is heavier than my laptop, I think!