Zenit-ET with bronze dials

The camera I have in my collection has a distinct feature that I have not found anywhere else so far – it has bronze dials. I’ve googled for hours, I asked a few Estonian, Ukrainian and Belarusian camera museums and have so far not found any mention of such combination (Zenit ET with black body and bronze dials). 

So far I have not found any mentions of such combination, so can’t confirm that it’s a special edition as such. At this point the most likely reason seems to be either:

1. A hobbyist has modified the dials by anodizing the dials manually (e.g. with chemicals).
2. The dials have naturally anodized due to sun light and/or other natural causes.

The current most viable theory came from a discussion with a Redditor, who proposed that it’s the result of sun exposure and shared some photos of similar occurrences. I kind of see why there would be no mentions of such combination if it’s just due to “aging” in a sense, but I’d still expect to find at least 1 similar photo of such combination. None of the google images, or anything on sale in eBay had anything like that. Also, the examples provided by the reddit user, they looked faded, uneven and appeared matte – which I’d expect from natural causes. But this camera has the dials glossy and colorization/saturation is completely even – making me lean more towards the manual modification theory. Which ever the case – it is a special camera, but so far with no reason to believe it’s special edition as such.

If you have any additional information or details about the given combination feel free to share them with me.

At the time of taking the photos I had the Industar-50-2 on the body. Now I’ve replaced it with Helios 44-2.

If you are interested in buying the camera, write me an email.