No. 4 Kodet

Format

glass plates or roll film (roll holder extra)

System

Kodak Kodet

Shutter

Kodet, time and instantaneous, five speed positions

Focusing

sliding focus, ground glass screen

Metering

none

Spec Notes

A RIGID BOX CAMERA, not a folder - Kodak's own words are 'The Kodets are made in two styles, the Regular and Folding.' The Kodet line is where Kodak stops buying its shutter in from Bausch & Lomb and fits its own. THE SEPARATION FROM THE FOLDING KODET RESTS ON ONE FIRM DIMENSION PLUS ONE LADDER DIFFERENCE, and the honest version is: body architecture (a 402 cubic inch sycamore box at 3 lb 3 oz against a 188 cubic inch mahogany folder at 2 lb, with patent non-collapsing bellows) is firm, while the lens difference is NOT - the first brief split them on achromatic against rapid rectilinear, but Kodak's 1897 price list offers BOTH cameras both rungs at $12.00 and $17.50, so the two museum specimens simply carry different rungs. Dates settled at T1: 'Kodet' appears in no 1892 or 1893 heading and in no 1898 heading, confirming 1894-1897 and refuting historiccamera's 'approximately 1889'. A PRICE CONFLICT INSIDE ONE KODAK VOLUME: the 1894 model page says $15.00 and the same catalogue's own Kodet Price List says $12.00. 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, rotating plate with three apertures; a rapid rectilinear rung was offered

Rangefinder

No

Negative Size

4 x 5 in

Alternate Names

—

Introduced

1894