No. 4 Folding Kodet

Format

glass plates or roll film (roll holder extra)

System

Kodak Kodet

Shutter

Kodet, time and instantaneous, slow-fast adjustment; Bausch & Lomb Kodak shutter with iris stops, or Bausch & Lomb iris diaphragm, on the upper rungs

Focusing

sliding focus, ground glass screen

Metering

none

Spec Notes

Two named variants fold in, each on one dimension. *** THE SENTENCE EVERYONE QUOTES FOR THE JUNIOR IS MIS-TRANSCRIBED BY ITS SOURCE. *** historiccamera renders it 'The Junior is like the No. 4 Kodet, except that it has a different shutter' - dropping the word FOLDING and the second clause entirely. Kodak's own text compares the Junior to the FOLDING Kodet, which is also what its dimensions and weight match. The Special's lens grade does NOT count as a dimension: Kodak's 1897 price list gives plain and Special the same ladder at a constant $3-$5 offset, and the offset is the body. Made in horizontal and vertical styles, counted together in production and not a row. AA-13's $23.50 for this camera matches no catalogue figure found; the closest is 1897's $22.50. NO PRICE IS RECORDED ON THIS ROW. AA-13's 'ORIGINAL LIST PRICE' column is not a list price - established in slice 7 and sharpened in slice 8. In this era Kodak's own catalogues give the real figures anyway, and where they matter to a row-shape decision they are quoted in these notes instead of stored as data. DATES ARE MARKET DATES, NOT PRODUCTION. AA-13 heads its columns 'ON THE MARKET FROM / TO'. Where Kodak's own catalogues place a model outside AA-13's span the conflict is recorded on the row rather than resolved. DATING: NONE EXISTS, AND THAT IS A POSITIVE FINDING RATHER THAN A GAP. No serial-to-year mapping was ever published for any Kodak of this era and there is no date code; Kodak's own catalogues print no serial anywhere. AA-13 records only two ceilings - the highest known serial on The Kodak as 5192 and on the No. 1 as 15,559 - and gives no serial note at all for any other model. A serial here establishes only that a camera falls below a known ceiling. What DOES date these cameras is Kodak's own vocabulary and hardware sequence: the body address marking ('Eastman Co. Rochester' runs 1889-1892) and the shutter succession, sector 1890 to Barker 1892 to Bausch & Lomb iris diaphragm 1893.

Fitted Lens

achromatic or rapid rectilinear, rotating plate with four apertures (f/11, f/16, f/22, f/32)

Rangefinder

No

Negative Size

4 x 5 in

Alternate Names

—

Introduced

1894