No. 3B Quick Focus Kodak

Format

125 roll film

System

Kodak Quick Focus

Shutter

Eastman Rotary, with three stops - a rotating plate with three apertures, T and I

Focusing

preset - "Simply turning a dial and pressing a spring puts the camera in focus for any desired distance." A spring throws the whole lens panel forward to a detent stop

Metering

none

Spec Notes

*** ONE AA-13 LINE, ONE ROW - AND THE SILENT-REVISION HUNT FOUND A REAL CHANGE THAT STILL DOES NOT SPLIT IT. *** The spec list DOES change while the printed name stays put: 'Shutter, Eastman Rotary.' in 1906 and 1907 becomes 'Shutter, Eastman Rotary, WITH THREE STOPS.' in 1908, 1909 and 1910. But 'three stops' IS NOT NEW HARDWARE - SMG describes BOTH the Model B and the Model C as having 'a rotating plate with three apertures'. It is fuller wording for a part already there. The 1907 heading reshuffle ('Quick Focus Kodak No. 3B' against 'No. 3B QUICK-FOCUS KODAK') is a RENAME, and 'Capacity, 10 exposures' becoming 'without reloading' is FILM CAPACITY; both are excluded by name. THE ONE PER-LETTER TELL FOUND ANYWHERE, and why it fails: a collector page reports that the Model C has a DIAL where 'The earlier models had a SLIDER to set the focusing distance'. That is a scale-setting CONTROL, not the mechanism - SMG describes the mechanism identically for B and C, 'lens panel springs forwards to set position when button is pressed' - and it separates C from A-and-B only. THERE IS NO A-VERSUS-B TELL IN ANY SOURCE REACHED. Maximum reachable score is one dimension for a two-way split, and everything else is constant across 1906-1910: meniscus achromatic, Eastman Rotary, 125 film, box body, no bellows in any year. *** THAT SAME COLLECTOR PAGE IS WHERE THE RELAY WAS CAUGHT FABRICATING. *** Fed a merged-quote question it returned 'the only one to have a dial to select the SHUTTER SPEED'; the page is truncated mid-word at 'the only one to have a d' and the words 'shutter speed' appear nowhere on it. The real reading came from a verbatim-bounded re-ask. CONFLICT RECORDED, NOT RESOLVED: Kodak's own catalogues carry this camera 1906 through 1910 and it is ABSENT from the 1911 catalogue, which contains no 'Quick' in any camera name, against AA-13's 1906-1911. Two collector sources disagree with AA-13 in both directions (1905-1911 and 1906-1910). AA-13's range is kept and the shelf recorded. kodaklist.com's per-letter pages 429-rate-limited on four attempts - COULD NOT RETRIEVE, and the last door open on the letters. historiccamera datasheets were used for NOTHING load-bearing here. 683 and 684 reproduce AA-13's exact dates, its exact wood-front/metal-front pair and its focusing lock, and cite nothing; 673 and 597 cite nothing either. A laundered copy of the source it appears to corroborate is not corroboration. SOURCE-HANDLING NOTE FOR THIS SLICE: the WebFetch relay was caught FABRICATING WHEN LED - four times independently, once inventing 'a dial to select the SHUTTER SPEED' to complete a page truncated at 'the only one to have a d', where the real next sentence says the earlier models had a SLIDER to set the FOCUSING DISTANCE. Every reading behind this row was taken with neutral questions, an explicit 'or say not stated' escape hatch, control questions whose answer had to be NO, and a second ask in different wording. THE FILM NUMBER IS AN ATTRIBUTION, NOT A KODAK DESIGNATION ON THIS ROW. Kodak's catalogues of this period name the cartridge by exposure count and picture size - 'N. C. Film Cartridge, 12 exposures (4 x 5)' - not by number. The number reaches this catalogue from AA-13 and from museum records. Kodak DOES print a film number later in the era: the 1927 catalogue and Kodak's own No. 3A Panoram booklet both print 'No. A 122', which is why that one row carries no caveat. Values resting on VULGAR FRACTIONS are treated as unreliable: these scans return different fractions on repeat reads of the same page while prose, model names, shutter names, dollar figures and INTEGERS stay stable. EVERY row-shape call in this slice was decided on an integer, on prose, or on a dollar figure. NO PRICE IS RECORDED. AA-13's price column is not a list price, and in this slice the gap is measurable: AA-13 and Kodak's own catalogues agree to the cent for the Panorams ($10.00/$20.00/$40.00), the 3B Quick Focus ($12.00) and the No. 2 Stereo ($15.00), and disagree by a factor of two to three for the Cartridge Kodaks and the No. 4A Folding Kodak. Where a figure decides a row shape it is quoted in these notes instead. DATES ARE MARKET DATES, NOT PRODUCTION - AA-13 heads its columns 'ON THE MARKET FROM / TO'. Where Kodak's own catalogue presence contradicts AA-13 the conflict is recorded on the row and NOT resolved. DATING: NONE EXISTS. No serial-to-year mapping and no date code was ever published for any Kodak of this era. Specimen serials are recorded where a museum photographed one, for provenance only and NOT decodable: No. 4 Panoram Model C 10368 and Model D 12238; No. 4 Screen Focus 2274; 3B Quick Focus 4763K, 9066K and 7899K; Stereo Kodak Model 1 LENS numbers 52570 and 53277; No. 4 Series C Eastman Plate Camera 792. The trailing K on the Quick Focus serials is NOT SOURCED - no decode exists in anything reachable.

Fitted Lens

Meniscus Achromatic

Rangefinder

No

Negative Size

3-1/4 x 5-1/2 in

Alternate Names

—

Introduced

1906