The desire to determine the year of issue of a lens arises most often from idle curiosity. After all, this characteristic does not affect any more qualitative indicators of shooting. There is a large selection of lenses on the modern lighting market, but for example, we can highlight and consider the assortment from Canon, Nikon, Sony, Minolita and Leica.
It is necessary
- - paper;
- - a pen;
- - PC with Internet access.
Instructions
Step 1
Examine the lens barrel or mount ring carefully. Write down the serial number on a piece of paper. It should consist of numbers and letters for Canon, Sony, Minolita and Nikon, or only numbers for Leica.
Step 2
To determine the year of manufacture for Sony and Minolita lenses, use the database - www.mhohner.de. The information on the site is presented in English, but even without an interpreter, you can easily find out the necessary data. In the Name column, find your model, and in the Release year column, respectively, the year of release.
Step 3
If you have a Nikon lens, find out the information of interest from a similar database - www.photosynthesis.co.nz/nikon/serialno.html. The first column of the table contains the articles of photographic equipment, and the last - Date - the year of its release.
Step 4
Decode the serial number of the Canon lens. The first letter is the factory where it was made. There are only three of them: F - Fukushima, U - Utsunomiya, O - Oita. They are all located in Japan. The second letter is the year of issue. For example, K - 1996 or 1970. The first two characters of the digital code are the month in which the lens rolled off the assembly line. 01 - January, 02 - February, 03 - March, etc.
Step 5
The picture shows a lens with the serial number UW 0206. Its full decoding will look like this: Utsunomiya, February 2008 or 1982. The exact year of manufacture is determined logically. If you just bought a lens from a store, it can't possibly be released in 1982. Accordingly, the first date will be correct.
Step 6
Determine the year of manufacture of a Leica lens by comparing your serial number with the corresponding value from the database for this type of technology. You can find it, for example, here - https://blog.leica-camera.ru/2011/1136-17-01/. There is no regularity in the chronological sequence of these numbers.
