We’ve got awfully used to technology getting cheaper by the year over the past decade. But the party’s over. I got my hands on Canon’s newest EOS DSLR camera this week, in the form of the EOS 500D (we’ll have a full review next week).

It’s a nice enough addition to the legendary DSLR range that began with the 300D in 2004, but the price is flabbergasting.

Granted, the new model has new features – HD video and a better (much better) screen – but none that justify a price hike of over 50% from the previous model. Yes that’s right – over 50%. When we reviewed the 450D at launch last year, the price with 18-55mm lens was £600. The new model is a sneeze short of a round grand, at a list price of £969.

A thousand pounds. For a camera that not even Canon will pretend is designed for professionals (or even very serious amateurs).

It’s not Canon’s fault, of course. Having recently finished writing a digital camera group test (which you’ll be able to read in the next issue of PC Pro, on the shelves around 15th May), an overriding theme was the fact that the pound sterling’s weakness (and the general state of the economy) is having a huge effect on prices across the board.

So anyway, I seem to recall some economist somewhere once saying that you could chart the progress of the economy in terms of the price of Mars bars. Apparently they track the state of fiscal play very well.

So I’ve decided to create a new economic index, designed to chart the progress of the economy in terms that techies can get to grips with.

It’s called the CameraIndex(tm), and it’s based on the price of successive models in the EOS xxxD camera line, from the groundbreaking EOS 300D in 2004 to the new EOS 500D. It’s exclusively revealed in the graph below:

Eeek. No wonder we got used to technology getting cheaper and cheaper. And even less wonder that a price hike is such a shock.

Just for fun, I thought I’d check my theory of a correlation with the wider economy, by superimposing the value of the UK’s FTSE 100 index – a fair-ish indicator of the general state of the economy – at the same points in time:

That’ll be quite a nice inverse correlation then.

If you’d like to license the use of the CameraIndex(tm), do please drop me a line. Subscription fees will be levied in f-stops (or possibly hundredths of a second – I haven’t decided yet).