No. 3A Panoram Kodak

Format

A122 roll film - Kodak prints "Film No. A 122" in its own booklet and "Kodak Film Cartridge, 5 exposures (No. A 122)" in the 1927 catalogue

System

Kodak Panoram

Shutter

Panoram - the lens and shutter unit is revolved by a spring set with a tension lever, two speeds marked SLOW and FAST

Focusing

fixed

Metering

none

Spec Notes

*** THIS ROW HAS ONE SOURCED DIMENSION AGAINST THE No. 4 PANORAM - FORMAT - AND IS KEPT ANYWAY. IT IS THE ROW AN ADVERSARY CAN TAKE, AND THE HONEST COUNT IS RECORDED HERE RATHER THAN DRESSED UP. *** It is kept on a ground OUTSIDE the dimension count: it is a separately named, separately catalogued Kodak product with its own instruction book and its own two-year window after the No. 4 ended in 1924, not a variant within a line. The 2+ rule governs splitting a line into variants; it is not a merge rule for distinct products. WHY THE OTHER DIMENSIONS ARE NOT AVAILABLE: the mechanism is confirmed IDENTICAL to the No. 1 and No. 4 by Kodak's own booklet - 'The lens and shutter unit is driven by a spring, causing the lens and shutter to revolve in the opening and expose the film' - fixed focus, meniscus, two speeds, brilliant finder with hood, two tripod sockets, one T-level, winding key and red window, every item matching. ITS FOCAL LENGTH IS NOT SOURCED ANYWHERE REACHABLE, so its lens cannot be shown to differ from the No. 4's; on the geometry a 10 inch picture at 120 degrees implies roughly a 5 inch lens, which is plausibly the SAME lens. THE 120-DEGREE FIGURE IS AA-13 ONLY - it is absent from Kodak's 1927 catalogue AND from Kodak's own instruction book for this exact camera, which says instead 'The scope of view or the width of the picture is indicated by the V-shaped lines on the top of the camera'. The only degrees in that booklet are the finder hood's 45. And the angle would not count as a second dimension even if sourced, because it is entailed by focal length and picture length. A122 IS AUTOGRAPHIC STOCK BUT THIS IS NOT AN AUTOGRAPHIC CAMERA - no writing door in the booklet, no autographic line in the 1927 block. The 1927 spec block does print 'Black bellows', which looks like a body-architecture difference and IS NOT USABLE AS ONE: the page never calls this camera folding, and the No. 1 and No. 4 were discontinued BEFORE Kodak adopted that fuller spec block, so their silence is an artefact of catalogue era rather than evidence of absence. 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. 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, fixed aperture, fixed focus. FOCAL LENGTH NOT SOURCED - it is in neither Kodak's 1927 catalogue nor Kodak's own instruction book for this camera

Rangefinder

No

Negative Size

3-3/4 x 10-3/8 in

Alternate Names

—

Introduced

1926