Medalist year of manufacture ?

[westfi1]

I have a Kodak Medalist ll with serial number 40861 on the body and ES2197L on the lens. The letter "L" has a circle around it. Can anyone tell me in what year the camera was made ? Thanks.

 

[Mike Bates]

Kodak used a letter code for lens manufacturing date based on the "word" CAMEROSITY.

C 1
A 2
M 3
E 4
R 5
O 6
S 7
I 8
T 9
Y 0

Based on that, your lens was manufactured in 1947 and the circled "L" meant it was Lumenized, meaning it had a hard coating applied to the air/glass surfaces of the lens.

 

[John Wiegerink]

Going by the first two letters in the lenses serial number is fine unless somebody down the line swapped out lenses. I bought a Medalist I that had a Medalist II lens on it. Whoever owned at one time put a synced shutter and lens off a II. I wanted a user at the time so it didn't matter to me.

 

[wolfmanwide]

amazing lens!

 

[guangong]

Because I almost never use on camera flash, I prefer the fine focusing knob, which was replaced by flash contact. Lenses of the later Medalist I cameras were coated. The L stands for Luminized, Kodak’s TM for coated lense. The lens is very, very good...whether coated or uncoated.

 

[Mr Flibble]

The Medalist I did have internal coated lens surfaces on the Ektars as I recall, just not the Luminized Hard Coating used on the Ektars on the Medalist II.

But yes, that EKTAR is amazing.