The first FED cameras were created on the model of the German rangefinder camera Leica I and were assembled by hand in 1933 in the workshops of the Children's Labor Commune of the NKVD of the Ukrainian SSR named after Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky (hence the name in the first letters - FED).

For more than two decades, the industry - mainly two enterprises - FED (since 1934) and KMZ (since 1948) - produced a camera - a copy of the second model of the German Leica (1932). After the war, Leica was copied by many countries, both Western and Eastern. In 1955, on the basis of the FED camera, the FED-2 was mass-produced.

FED-5 is a Soviet rangefinder camera, the second model from the unified series of the same name, which also included FED-5V and FED-5S cameras. Produced by the Kharkov production machine-building association "FED" from 1977 to 1990. It differs from its counterparts by the presence of an exposure meter (compared to the FED-5V), and from the FED-5S by the presence of diopter adjustment and the absence of frames in the viewfinder.

The FED-5 series became the last mass-produced popular line of FED rangefinder cameras: 2, 3, 4, 5. In the 90s, the plant stopped producing cameras.