Praktica's mid-60s mechanical M42 SLR — the Nova, cloth shutter, manual exposure, 1964.
The Praktica Nova is a 35mm film SLR made by VEB Pentacon in Dresden, East Germany, from the mid-1960s, part of the Nova family that preceded the later L-series. It was a mid-decade M42 body sold as an affordable system camera and exported to the UK and Western Europe during the 1960s.
It is an M42 screw-mount SLR with a horizontal-travel cloth focal-plane shutter offering speeds to around 1/500 plus B. The base Nova has no built-in meter, so exposure is set fully manually; metered variants in the family added a stop-down CdS meter. The pentaprism finder shows a fixed screen. The shutter is mechanically timed and works entirely without a battery.
The Nova suits students and beginners wanting a simple, battery-free mechanical M42 SLR to learn exposure on, using a separate meter or the sunny-16 method. It handles in the plain, robust manner of period Prakticas, and runs on the large, cheap M42 lens pool; the lower top shutter speed and lack of a meter on the base model are the main limitations.
On the used market, since the base body has no meter to test, focus on the mechanics: run the cloth shutter across its speeds watching for capping, pinholes or a sticky curtain, and inspect the foam light seals and mirror-damper foam, which perish on cameras of this age. Check the prism for desilvering or haze, test film advance and rewind feel, and confirm the focusing screen and slow-speed timing are sound; on metered variants also test the CdS meter.