January 1984 Prices

I thought we might be interested in the prices from the Eric Fishwick catalogue, dated January 1984. We can all equate the info to what we earned at the time.
24mm f2.8 A £117.00
28mm f2 A £176.00
28mm f2.8 A £65.00
35mm f2 A £130.00
35mm f2.8 A £75.00
50mm f2 M £34.00
50mm f1.7 A £40.00
50mm f1.4 A £65.00
50mm f2.8 A Macro £113.00
135mm f2.8 A £75.00
200mm f4 A £103.00
300mm f4 A* £318.00
24-50mm f4 £161.00
35-105mm f3.5 £155.00
28-135mm f4 £272.00
70-210-mm f4 £155.00
100mm f4 Dental Macro £143.00
Close up lens set for above £72.00

The Historic Inflation Calculator is quite fun to compare these prices to today

My gross pay on 31st Jan 1984 was £663.58.

Might be called as SAD but I recorded my pay from the day I started work. In September 1966 it was £21 8s 4d (£362 per annum)

In my entire working life I didn't gross £1/2M.

regards
Bernard

I had a paper round at the time. I think I earned £1 for the evening papers and 50p for the Sundays.

I saved for a year to buy a second hand camera (I think it was a Cosina) for £50!

And at the time I could then afford to buy and develop 1 roll of film a week.

I had (literally) no money for anything else!

(Who says school days are the best of your life? What utter rot).

I can't remember what I earned way back then. I do remember that when Pentax launched the ME Super I bought mine for about £150 from Dixons at the corner of Gordon Street, and Union Street in Glasgow. Since I worked a couple of doors along from there, I knoew the staff quite well, so I managed to get them to throw in 10 rolls of Kodak Colour 100ASA/ISO 24 exposure for free. Through time, I added lenses and stuff from other shops such as Elena Mae in Sauchiehall Street, or Lasky's in Buchanan Street (before they moved to West Nile Street - it's now the China Buffet King, I believe)....

Aaaaaah!!.. MEMORIES!!

Interesting to note that in 1988 or 89 when I purchased my 50mm f1.4 A it cost me a staggering £100! The 50mm f1.2 A was £200 - I passed on that!

Dunno about 1984 but can remember my first wage after leaving Manchester Uni in 1966........£900 a year ....remeber thinking ....£1k would be nice.

Yes ...I'm one who managed to see England win a World Cup ..might not happened again in my lifetime .

I'm Scottish, so I'm saying nothing!!

My first wage, age 16 as a trainee draughtswoman was just 11 pounds a week. 10.52 after deductions. Somehow I managed to learn to drive, run a car, pay my mum bed and board and save money on that!

My next job, a year later, as a computer operator gave me an astounding 23 pounds a week take home pay.

Jan. 1984 the UK photo industry was probably still in recession
and some dumping was probably going on

Zooms were all the rage around that time and the 50mm f/1.4 sounds
like it was being dumped. Evidence of the lack of interest in prime
lenses is that the A 135mm f/2.8's are very rare on the SH market
nowadays so they mustn't have sold well due to most zooms covering
135mm.

Those were standard prices at the time Algi, no dumping going on as you put it. Prices just steadily and slightly increased as the years went by.

There were computers when you were 17?
(Going to hide now)

hi
when i started my apprenticeship in 1969 aged 15
i was paid £3-12-6 and out of that
i got £1-25 spending money
when i qualified at 20 i got
a staggering £40 a week
neil

The company that took me on for the above astounding salary in 1966 bought, for the drawing office, a calculator that was built into a desk the size of an A0 board and had to employ a girl especially to enter the data. She was called a computer.

In those days we all aspired to Otis King slide rules and only a very few years later I built a Sinclar Cambridge calculator that did everything that the drawing offie one did apart from printing the answer.

regards
Bernard

Some prices from The Photographic Blue Book, Wallace Heaton Ltd.
dated July 1954:

Box Cameras
Ensign Ful-Vue Super £2 19s 8p + 12s 8p for Ever-Ready Case
Agfa Synchro Box Camera £2 9s 0p + 8s 0p for Canvas Case
Six-20 Brownie(Brownie E)£2 15s 8p + 7s 3p for Canvas Case
Zeiss Box Tengor £6 2s 0p + 8s 8p for Canvas Case
Luxette with flash contact £5 14s 6p + £1 1s 6p for Imitation Leather Case

Roll Film Cameras (3.25 x 2.25 in.)

Ensign Snapper £5 10s 8p + £1 1s 11p for Ever-Ready case
Ensign Clubman £12 8s 6p + £1 1s 11p for Ever-Ready Case
Voigtlander Bessa I £23 10s 5p + £2 19s 8p for Leather Case

35mm Miniature Cameras

Zeiss Ikon Contina £20 2s 10p
Reid Camera £120 0s 0p + £4 0s 0p Leather ever-Ready Case
Wrayflex c/w 50mm, f2 £95 8s 0p + £3 3s 7p Ever-Ready Leather Case
Alpa Alnea c/w 50mm f2.5 Xenon £215 6s 3p + £9 2s 2p

Hasselblad 1000F £299 0s 0p Lens not included, e.g.Sonnar f3.5,
13.5 £170 18s 7p

Note on Leica & Rolleiflex Cameras

These Cameras are at present not freely available owning to import restrictions. Genuine priority needs are, however, considered by the Board of Trade.

etc. Regards

Oso