Some of the Nikon scanners were hard to find in stores for a while. I worked at a camera store last summer and we could not get Nikon to send us any scanners, they just did't have many of them being shipped in from Japan so we'd get one every once in a while when they felt like sending one, even though we had an order placed for many more. I think that was the initial cause of the ebayers jacking prices, and they're still trying to get those high prices.