Kodak Baby Brownie Special

Kodak Baby Brownie Special Overview

The Kodak Baby Brownie Special is a very simple box camera constructed of Bakelite, an early plastic. It has a basic meniscus lens with a minimum focus distance of five feet and a single fixed shutter speed (estimated to be about 1/40) activated by the button on the side. The optical viewfinder runs across the top of the camera next to the film advance knob. A nice braided hand strap is supposed to span the top of the camera from the metal brackets on either side but it’s missing on this one.

This camera retailed for $1.25 (about $20 in today’s money) and although it seems to be as simple as cameras get, the normal Baby Brownie (which only cost $1, the modern equivalent of roughly $16) was even more basic with flip-up metal brackets instead of the Special’s optical viewfinder and a shutter release lever very similar to the one seen on the Six-20 Bull’s Eye. The Kodak Baby Brownie series uses 127 film which, shockingly, is still being made by a single company in Croatia.

I received this Kodak Baby Brownie Special as a wedding gift along with an Agfa B-2 Cadet and two Allied campaign maps from WWII.