USSRPhoto said:
Based on a recent conversation with a well known camera dealer in Europe, Photo Arsenal has quite a solid reputation in Europe especially at camera shows. Their primary focus though is NOT FSU cameras so their income primarily comes from other sources than those.
Namely old Leica gear. Boris Yamshchik is apparently from Kiev, however, and much of his early business in Nuremberg apparently was selling FSU gear - I have several friends who bought plain Kiev 88 bodies from him in the mid-1990s.
I had a bit of an insight into this early side of his business when I went to Kiev in 2004 on family business and asked around if anyone had some camera gear they wanted to buy or have repaired. A friend gave me a Kiev 88 body, bought from Arsenal in the 90s, with mirror lock-up and a hanging shutter curtain. Mirror lock-up is an aftermarket modification on the Kiev 88 that is usually realized with a separate button. On this body, however, the mirror would flap up when you pressed the shutter button halfways. Quite convenient actually, but the shutter only worked when you pressed the button very quickly; pressing it slightly more slowly would cause the shutter curtain to hang the next time you released the shutter on "B" or a slow speed. Because the lock-up mechanism got engaged every time you pressed the shutter, this was impossible to circumvent. I took the camera to Kiev and gave it to Gevorg Vartanyan of Arax for repair. Two weeks later Gevorg Vartanyan gave me the body back and said it was impossible to repair the mechanism in its present state because of a design flaw. In the end we had the mechanism removed and a "normal" one with button lock-up fitted. Gevorg helped me track down the technician who actually fitted this particular mechanism in this particular body in 1995 or so, and the technician said this was from an experimental pre-series of 10 bodies where they just tried out how different variants of the aftermarket lock-up mechanism could be realised. This variant was known to cause flaws eventually, but since they had the body anyway they gave it to Boris Yamshchik, who was at the time buying medium format bodies in Kiev and already interested in rare and unusual gear, together with an explicit warning that this particular mechanism had problems that any potential buyer would experience. He, however, just sold it on as a body with mirror lock-up to my friend, forgetting to mention any of the problems that this particular body had. So the technicians had no problems just selling what was effectively a broken body, albeit with a warning, and neither did he. From that experience I've been somewhat wary with considering to buy any FSU gear beyond the complexity of a FED if the person I buy it from isn't someone I know and trust personally. I can't really estimate his business practices now that he's selling $30.000 cameras, but back then his business practice appears to me to have fitted to a certain pattern of carelessness that I have witnessed many times in the FSU.
USSRPhoto said:
What you will notice, despite the outrageous prices if you look at history of arsenal sales, people DO buy the cameras from them at quite high prices and quite impressive quantities.. so despite all moaning and complaining on the forums, this kind of business model seems to work out quite well for them.
Regarding the eBay sales, it's because he apparently uses eBay more of a catalogue to keep mindshare, so that people will see his name often and associate it with very exotic camera gear. I don't think he actually sells a large percentage of his stuff via eBay; I guess people will just call, or write a letter, or go to Nuremberg with an offer on a specific item. If you're intent on buying a $30.000 camera, spending $1000 to go there and back to actually take a look at it seems more reasonable than paying the same in PayPal fees and just trusting the camera to the mail.
USSRPhoto said:
From what I hear the owner is VERY WELL to do.
Oh, I have no problems imagining that. However, he still sells cameras at camera fairs.
Philipp
