WHAT CONDITION THE CONDITION IS IN: AS IS. Not film tested. This Kodak Starmite II is in remarkably good condition for its age. Perfect candidate for display, maybe even shooting. Scroll down to learn why this camera thinks it’s remarkable. Spoiler: it has a point.

A grey plastic box, small enough to slip into a coat pocket, sitting on a drugstore counter in 1962. It's utterly unremarkable, and yet that's the whole point.

The Kodak Starmite II wasn't trying to seduce you; it was trying to democratize you, to hand a twelve-shot slice of memory-making to anyone with a couple of dollars and a sunny afternoon, from Rochester to Coburg to Paris, where the French, of course, insisted on renaming it the Starluxe II.

It's a camera of contradictions: sharp at the center, dreamy at the edges, which is rather like most people's recollections of the Sixties. It features a rotary shutter that fires with a metallic ping so charmingly inelegant it sounds like someone flicking a tin can.

The dual-aperture lever toggles between f/11 and f/16. Three countries built it and yet every variant clicks, winds, and vignettes in precisely the same way. It's a kind of global consensus the twentieth century managed to achieve in plastic and glass, if nowhere else.

The Starmite II won't flatter you, won't lie to you, and won't pretend the corners of your photograph aren't going soft.