about chinese Smena

for information...
I found it in old (1958 ?) Sovietskoe photo magazine.

may be Vlad can translate kindly here ?

houpsss forgot:

Alain,

it says that in Chuntzin (?) China a mass production of a first Chinese camera started. "Camera Yantzi is analogous to Russian Smena." Then there is a technical specification and then it says that the factory is also preparing for a production of another camera of "Leica" type and a twin-reflect camera.

Cheers,
Vlad.

oh, thanks again Vlad..
may be interest for Juani information ,??...

The "Yangtze" River or Chang Jiang is the name in English and Chinese. Russsian is written like it is spoken, so foreign words may look very different. I always laugh to John Wayne written in Russian...
It was made by Yangtze Government Electrical Factory in Chingqing, Sichuan. As far as I know the factory did not produce other cameras, but in Sichuan there was other factories making TLR called Hua Ying and SLR called Pedarl River.

The other Smena-clone "Hua Shan" was however made at Xibei Optical Technical Factory in Xian, which also produced a Lubitel-clone called Changle.So sounds like they referred to that TLR?

Leica-type cameras were several.
Yangtze River (1958) in Nanjing, FED-2 clone. Maybe the name mislead the USSR press, like Zenit made in Belarus and in Russia?
Nanjing (59-61?) also in Nanjing, another clone of FED-2
Shanghai 58 (58-63?) in Shanghai, a copy of Leica-IIIb

Hopefully not too much OT as this does include links to FSU-cameras? Always glad to give my small information about Chinese cameras, which are indeed even much more a challenge than FSU-cameras!

Great Juhani!

A perfect explanation! The name may correctly be spelled as "YANTZI" the real chinese sound of Yang-tze.
This could pehaps be applied to the Zenit sound if we would write as the russians pronunciate - "ZINIT".

Regards LP
On time: Really funny and interesting the names of people at WWII like Wiston Churchill etc. written in Russian. We discover new persons!