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There is no flex or wobble in the lens barrel, nor any rattles or weird sounds. The drop-in filters slide in and out easily. The aperture rings clicks cleanly from stop to stop. Making small focus adjustments is easy because there is no play or slop. The focus ring has a light, pleasingly smooth throughout its focus range. After 25'ish years of use, there is nothing about this particular Mamiya M645 300mm APO's cosmetics or physical performance that gives me pause. The machining of the Mamiya's lens barrel, knobs and other controls remind me of the Canon EF 200mm F1.8 L's build quality and other telephoto lenses of that era. Source: Mamiya 645M 300mm F2.8 APO Street Price - October 1992 BUILD QUALITY AND HANDLING But the most reliable piece of information was looking through the old retailer advertisements in the back of the magazines, which put the lens at ~$7700 USD in the mid 90's. Reading through past magazines that Google scanned into their library, I have seen numbers range from $9,900 to $18,845. To decisively decode this, ~50 more entries with the little gold production sticker on the lens foot are needed.Īnd another mystery.

The pattern worked until lens 1000314 - which does not fit the pattern. Mapping the earliest found first letter to 1992 (when the lens was introduced) suggests "L" = 1992. The first letter is supposedly the year, second letter the month (A=January and so on).

Mamiya's 2 letter date code is equally mystifying. Both hypotheticals are 100% speculation on my part.

750 units? Or, maybe serial numbers were continuous, thus a production run of ~1250 units. Having fond memories of the lens from many years ago, I decided to give it a try again. I recently came across a nice Mamiya 300mm F2.8 APO. Released during film's pinnacle, the 300mm APO was designed to showcase resolution and best in class chromatic aberration management / performance. The Mamiya 645M 300mm F2.8 APO was a halo product to showcase Mamiya's optical prowess and the brand's boldness. $9,900 MSRP at Launch / ~$7,700 Street (1992)ġ86mm (35mm Equivalent, on a 645 film negative)īuilt-in (slides into place) plus Screw-on Extension