Damn.
The collectors have found Cameras. Sure, there are still some bargains to be found out there, but good film cameras, which five years ago you couldn’t GIVE away, are now often going for more than their original prices. I could have bought a burlap bag of Rollei 35 cameras for ten bucks in 2009, and now they’re worth a benjamin not working.
Even the Exacta, a real clunker of a beast, has gone up to insane prices and the lenses for it are commanding big bucks.
Leicas and Blads of course are almost back up to pre-digital pricing in most places.
The bargains are the old Contaflex. Insanely complex cameras, for the time. And buy two or three, because if you use them and they break, there is nobody who can fix one. But the glass…
I noticed Leica R8’s and R9’s are showing up in the $600-$700 range, where previously they were well over a thousand. The glass is still pricey, however.
yep. Good glass always will be, really. And now a bunch of digital makers are building adapters for digital cameras. Bastards.
I blame hipsters.
Well — I blame them for most things, so that’s not really a shock.
should get a couple of the ones the kids broke on line. Might get a buck or two out of them.
I’m hoping to buy a Nikon Df in 2017. Full-frame digital, but has manual controls much like the manual Nikon FM, or aperature priority FE.
And the good thing is, Nikon lens mounts are “backwards-compatible”, all the way back to early 1960’s Nikkor glass. The metering might not hook up on ’em all, but 98% of ’em can still be mounted and (manually) used on any modern digital Nikon body.
But yeah. I’d wanted a vintage Hasselblad 500 c/m, if for nothing else than to keep under a Plexiglas cube, as a display.
That is getting to be a distant wish, now. Thanks, hipsters!
Jim
Sunk New Dawn
Galveston, TX