A 1956 Kodak Camera Priced at $625?

My grandparents had this camera and there was a cheaper version of it at my Dad’s house when he passed away last year. I never paid much attention to it (thinking it was some cheap device) until I was poking around last night at the Internet Archive, going through old television commercials.

Then I watched this one from Kodak in 1956 showing that camera which only cost $74. That doesn’t sound like much, right? A simple purchasing power calculator shows that the relative value of that $74 in today’s dollars would equal $625.00! (This answer is obtained by multiplying $74 by the percentage increase in the consumer price index from 1956 to 2012).

Wow. So I guess paying $199 for a subsidized smartphone—with a built-in camera far superior than this one in it—doesn’t seem like much, heh?