Recently I was looking at new lenses and realized I have no idea how old or how many coatings the 2 lenses I bought off ebay have... With some digging I found out that my SA 90mm that looks brand spanking new is 37 years old! As such it is a single coated lens.
With that revelation I am wondering about my other lens, a Nikkor W 210mm f/5.6. I haven't been able to find much on how to date these lenses, or how to tell if they are single or multi-coated. Can anyone help? The serial # is: 745xxx.
I have yet to see a Nikkor-W without multicoatings.
Nikon designed (re-designed?) their entire series of large format lenses sometime in the early 1980's I believe, all their W-series appear to have the NIC (Nikon Integrated Coating) multicoating by then.
There are some older Nikkor large format lenses (and of course the Apo-Nikkor process lenses, etc) with single coatings such as the predecessor to the Nikkor-M series of tessar lenses (can't recall the designation - was it Nikkor-Q?) but I think that the W-series was designed from scratch with NIC.
Perhaps another forum member has some old Nikon LF brochures?
I have an old Nikon brocure from 1981 where the 210 W Nikkor is mentioned.
They used NIC multicoating on this lens in 1981.
The only variant version of the 210 mm W Nikkor I know is, that the first lenses produced had 77 mm filters and a copal 1 with a silver shutter speed ring, where the later versions has 67 mm filters and a copal 1 with a black shutter speed ring.
The old pre M Nikkor apo-tessar type lenses was named Nikkor-Q (quator for four lens elements).
I have one of those 67mm diameter. Is is multicoated, mine is 756xxx series. It's a great lens for 4x5 and 5x7, and I use for 8x10, as well. No movements allowed, on this format.
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