No. 4 Eastman Plate Camera

Format

glass plates

System

Eastman Plate Camera

Shutter

Unicum

Focusing

rack and pinion with extra extension; ground glass screen, spring-actuated reversible back

Metering

none

Spec Notes

BRAND KODAK, NOT EASTMAN - see the No. 3 row for the full argument. Series C and D fold on one dimension and on total assignability failure. A NOTE ON HOW THE BRIEF REACHED ITS ANSWER: the bellows sentence exists in exactly ONE historiccamera datasheet, 558, and 558 is the No. 4; datasheet 627, which is the one explicitly covering the No. 3 'Series C & D', contains NO sentence comparing C to D and no mention of a bellows difference at all. The brief took the No. 4's sentence and applied it to the No. 3 row. That cross-application was unsupported when it was made, and is now supported instead by the four physical specimens. 558 and 627 are NOT clones of each other - they diverge on shutter, body and length - so the historiccamera cloning pathology does not recur here; but 558 carries no citations of any kind, so nothing load-bearing rests on it. Movements per SMG: 'sliding rising and cross front, swing back both directions, reversible back'. NO T1 EVIDENCE - absent from six Kodak catalogue years. 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. 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

Bausch & Lomb Rapid Rectilinear; a Plastigmat was optional

Rangefinder

No

Negative Size

4 x 5 in

Alternate Names

—

Introduced

1901