Matthew Allen
Well-known
I just spent a day and a night in Paris for my sister’s 21st birthday and in a spare hour or two, my dad and I walked down the Boulevard Beaumarchais to look in all the camera shops. If you didn’t know, there are around a dozen spaced out over a few blocks and pretty well all of them have large used stocks, something that’s becoming rarer and rarer elsewhere.
Anway, it was great fun in a look-but-don’t-touch sort of a way but I came away wondering how on Earth some of these places stay in business. Maybe they are fronts for money laundering but how in heaven’s name does anyway who prices an Olympus 35RC at €369 ($530 at current exchange rates!) stay afloat? The same shop had a 50/3.5 Elmar for €550 ($790) and an assortment of other price obscenities. Granted, this was the high end but even so thoughts of bargain bins of interesting Russian lenses were cast aside.
Oddly enough, in a reverse of the stereotype, La Maison du Leica was one of the most welcoming shops and also the only one where the prices belonged to the realms of reality. They had a great collection of Barnack and M bodies ranging from some serious collector stuff to some real users like an M3 DS for €350 and a large number of M4-2s, M4-Ps and M6s at fairly sensible prices. I wasn’t in a position to buy one (it has already been decided that my Christmas present is to be a IIIa – my first RF - which I’m really looking forward to) but I would definitely bear this shop in mind for the future. Another reason to go there is that in the window is a cross sectioned Tri-Elmar which is very cool.
In the end we spent the grand total of €4 between us on an optical slave shoe on which to mount an off-camera flash which I found in a tray of odds and ends. Happy days.
Matthew
Anway, it was great fun in a look-but-don’t-touch sort of a way but I came away wondering how on Earth some of these places stay in business. Maybe they are fronts for money laundering but how in heaven’s name does anyway who prices an Olympus 35RC at €369 ($530 at current exchange rates!) stay afloat? The same shop had a 50/3.5 Elmar for €550 ($790) and an assortment of other price obscenities. Granted, this was the high end but even so thoughts of bargain bins of interesting Russian lenses were cast aside.
Oddly enough, in a reverse of the stereotype, La Maison du Leica was one of the most welcoming shops and also the only one where the prices belonged to the realms of reality. They had a great collection of Barnack and M bodies ranging from some serious collector stuff to some real users like an M3 DS for €350 and a large number of M4-2s, M4-Ps and M6s at fairly sensible prices. I wasn’t in a position to buy one (it has already been decided that my Christmas present is to be a IIIa – my first RF - which I’m really looking forward to) but I would definitely bear this shop in mind for the future. Another reason to go there is that in the window is a cross sectioned Tri-Elmar which is very cool.
In the end we spent the grand total of €4 between us on an optical slave shoe on which to mount an off-camera flash which I found in a tray of odds and ends. Happy days.
Matthew
