Golden ring with rare Soviet camera costs 16,000 euros

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

If you have deep pockets and a great love of rare cameras, take a good look at this ring. This golden ring is actually an extremely rare spy camera from the Soviet era. It was used by the KGB.

The camera was spotted on eBay, where it is being sold for around 16,000 euros.

The seller, The seller, hit-camera-ltd-7569 based in Thornhill, Ontario, Canada, writes in the description that there are only two known examples of this camera. That is what was reported almost 30 years ago, when the second example was sold at auction.

We think there is only one other ring camera like this in the world, a spokesperson told the Los Angeles Times in 1991, after the camera was sold to an anonymous Japanese buyer for 18,500 euros, more than double the pre-sale estimate.

This camera on eBay does, however, have a remarkable difference from the ring camera sold in 1991. That one was gold-plated. This example, however, is made of 14K solid gold.

With the ring sold in 1991, the camera lens was disguised as the central stone of the ring. And that is exactly the feature the seller claims came from the Japanese collector Mr. Shibata's camera collection.

It is unclear whether this is the ring sold in 1991, and that ring was actually solid gold rather than gold-plated, but this ring is being sold for considerably less than the previous sale.

18,440 euros in March 1991 had the same buying power as around 34,081 euros at today's value.

The seller writes that the 44g camera ring takes photographs on 8 mm film strips and that the camera contains a lens with a variable aperture behind a crown-shaped rim. It also has a working guillotine shutter, perfectly clean optics, a circular film holder and a 14K solid gold decorative film cover.

This is what the film holder looks like when it contains a strip of 8 mm film:

If you have the money and the intention to buy something like this, you can view this camera by going to the current eBay listing.

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