As new technology comes out, you can be led to believe that the newer iteration always costs more than its predecessor because it is more advanced in every possible way. If you look at modern consoles, the Playstation 4 would have set you back at least £350 when it was released and still costs £300 today, so you would be forgiven for thinking an original Playstation would have cost half as much. However, an extract from a 1995 Argos catalogue appeared online displaying how much the original Playstation cost when it touched British shores for the first time.
The £430 asking price is alarming, even more so when the figure is adjusted to take into account inflation. That means a PS1 would have cost the equivalent of £740 in today's money! And that's before you took games into account, which would have set you back an inflation-adjusted cost of over £100! An early adopter would have required some very deep pockets...
Meanwhile, Nintendo was selling their SNES for £140, the equivalent of £240 today. Obviously the price of the Playstation reduced year on year to gain market share and by the end of the millennium, the price dropped to a far more reasonable £100 as seen on page 396 of this Argos extract.
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