The camera museum

On the basis of the cameras that I have collected in recent years, I would like to sketch a picture of the history of taking photos. I think that's something different than a history of photography. In the latter case, I would also have to deal with the great photographers of the past and I would have to pay attention to cameras that have been very important for the development of the camera, but which are not in my collection. I will also leave the development of film as a medium to store the images undisturbed for the time being.

n 1970 I got my first camera for my birthday, an Ilford point and shoot. It was called the Sportsman Instant C. It worked with a 126 cassettefilm. The only thing that is left of this camera are the photographs  I took with it and a picture of the camera in an old catalogue form 1969/1970. Other camera's followed. First in 1973 a Zenit E. When I got home with the camera it was late in the afternoon and after I had unpacked it, I was very disappointed that the needle of the light meter didn't move. I thought it was broken. I was convinced that with a SLR you could take any picture in any situation. I had no idea about aperture, shutter and ASA and what they had to do with each other. So with the Zenit I learned a lot.

Then several Pentax film cameras followed. In 2002 I bought my first digital camera, a small Minolta Dimage X with two megapixel sensor. I sold my last filmcamera, a Pentax MZ-5N. Several this time again digital Pentax cameras followed. Then in 2014 I came up the idea to buy back the film cameras I once owned. So I bought a Zenit E and a Pentax SP1000 and a Pentax ME super. This cameras I bought on Ebay. I remembered the old catalogue with al those beautiful but unreachable film cameras. They were not so out of my possibilities now. Wouldn't it be nice to try a 6x6 or 6x4.5 camera? So I started to collect. On this website I want to show you the cameras I have collected and the pictures I've taken with them. 

Pricing

If you are asking what a monetary value in the past is "worth" today, there is no one correct answer. A price or an income in the past would have been valued in different ways in that time by different people and under different contexts.
If your are asking about the "present worth" of buying a loaf of bread or filling the gas tank 40 years ago, are you thinking in terms of the amount of money you are spending today on such things? If so, use the price index of the average household called the CPI . On the other hand, if you are wondering how "affordable" this would be to the average person, use the GDP per capita, or a wage or average earnings index.
I use the site: https://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/relativevalue.php to calculate the worth of a given amount in a given year with the worth of that amount in 2016.
In 1931 a certain person earns 2250,00 a year. This income is 50% more then the income of a average person in that year. If you use the CPI (consumer price index) to calculate what this income would be worth in 2016 then this person would earn 31.500,00. However if you measure the purchasing power of that income in its relative ability to purchase a bundle of goods that a average household would buy 2250,00 in 1931 would mean an income of 168.000,00 today.

A simple Purchasing Power Calculator would say that the relative value of a camera that in 1935 cost 100,00 cost $1,890.00 in 2022. This answer is obtained by multiplying $100 by the percentage increase in the CPI from 1935 to 2020.

You could also look at the income value of that camera of 100,00. The income value is measured as the mukltiple of average income that would be needed to buy the camera. This measure uses the GDP per capita (measures a country's economic output per person and is calculated by dividing the GDP of a country by its population).

If you use the income value a camera that cost 100,00 in 1935 would be worth 10.900,00 in 2022. The number of 10.900,00 proves that luxury goods are much much cheaper to day then in the past. But the second number of 1890,00 gives a better indicating of the relative value of the article to day.