How to know production year of lense

[saigoncuoinam@gmail.com]

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Hi

 

I intend to buy a used Leica lense and don't know how to quickly determine the production year of the lense. For example a with a MPN code of 11884

 

Best regards

 

Tan

[Tonki-M]

product code is just a code to signify what the product is. to see the year, you need to look at lens archive like the one in Erwin Put's Leica Chronicle and match that with your product serial number.

[jaapv]

Not faultless, but a fairly good indication:

 

LEICA Lens Serial Numbers

 

 

As Sirot says, it is useless to search by product number. Quite a few have run for decades.

[Sergius]

A good site (not only for serial numbers) is the French site summilux.net

[michali]

Here's the link to the French site. It's fairly accurate with older lenses, not so accurate with determining newer lens mfg.dates:

 

Summilux - Num

[philipus]

This one is also good:

 

Leica User Information: Leica Lens Serial Numbers

 

Not to mention our own Wiki (check under each lens for the list of serial numbers and the corresponding year).

 

http://www.l-camera-forum.com/leica-wiki.en/index.php/Main_Page

 

The 11884 is of course the 90mm f/2 ASPH Apo-Summicron-M. See here for its Wiki page.