Is there any such thing as 'best value for money'?

But isn't it always better to wear a Hermes tie than a Van Heusen? Those Van Heusen's never stay tied. By noon they have mysteriously unraveled and are beginning to fray!
 
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For me , my M 8 is ' value for money ' because it settles me in a unique manner .

My collection of ' USSR Leica-likes ' and ' Kopy Kiev Kontaxes ' also ground and surround me , though they have little or no resale ' value ' .
For this very different reason they have value for me ... and I also found a lovely Fed lens for the M 8 .

I have just received my M 9 brochure - wondering why I now seem part of a selective place where I am totally out of my depth . LOL - maybe there should be a ' once in a lifetime ' club for expensive camera buyers !

I guess the best ' value for money ' is the camera of any description which continues to create fine photos long after it was purchased - my Minolta SRT , bought used in 1986 .
 
dee said:
I guess the best ' value for money ' is the camera of any description which continues to create fine photos long after it was purchased - my Minolta SRT , bought used in 1986 .
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Dear Dee,

Probably the best real-world definition so far! By that token it's my M4-P bought new in 1982 or so.

Cheers,

R.
 
Roger's concept of buying expensive but very high quality goods and keeping them for decades does represent very good value for money. But, I think, we often need to consider financial resources. Best value for person A is not always Best Value for Person B.

Someone with no savings and an annual income of $20,000 may, correctly, decide that the best value for money comes from a drugstore disposable camera.

For someone with marginal resources the ability to save up to make purchases is compromised. They need to spend almost every cent, or more, on a day-to-day-basis. This means they often need to make repeated purchases of cheap, shoddy, goods rather than buying and keeping a more expensive higher quality but prohibitively expensive alternative. (Yes, savings can almost always be made at any income level, but those with marginal resources have little room for discretionary spending or discretionary savings.)

Folks with greater financial resources make similar choices at different price points. Most of us, for example, buy cars based on the affordability of the monthly payment. We know that paying cash and buying a more expensive, more durable vehicle is better value but we choose not to do that because we deem the initial cost to be unaffordable because we'd rather spend the money elsewhere. (And that does open a can of worms.)

I.e., an individual's financial resources constrain the range of goods he can consider as "best value" candidates.

Looking at camera gear, it's hard for me to argue that a new MP is not very good value for money, if the buyer has the resources to absorb the initial cost. Ample evidence exists that an MP will last a very long time, and, importantly, no new camera is going to make it obsolete. Second if: You gotta use the camera. No camera is value for money if it sits on a shelf being admired.
 
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Best value for money only exists if you can assign specific numeric values to the quality you get. E.g. you can say that with the equipment for price X$ you get the image quality Z, with the equipment for Y$ you get the quality that you rate W. Then you compare Z/X vs W/Y. And you get quality per $ :) Easy...
So it's only a question of how you rate the quality. If quality is unacceptable (i.e. zero value), then regardless of how cheap the equipment is the quality per $ is still zero :) Technically, if you don't accept anything but large format quality best value for money is ... large format
 
wgerrard said:
Roger's concept of buying expensive but very high quality goods and keeping them for decades does represent very good value for money. But, I think, we often need to consider financial resources. Best value for person A is not always Best Value for Person B.

Someone with no savings and an annual income of $20,000 may, correctly, decide that the best value for money comes from a drugstore disposable camera.

For someone with marginal resources the ability to save up to make purchases is compromised. They need to spend almost every cent, or more, on a day-to-day-basis. This means they often need to make repeated purchases of cheap, shoddy, goods rather than buying and keeping a more expensive higher quality but prohibitively expensive alternative. (Yes, savings can almost always be made at any income level, but those with marginal resources have little room for discretionary spending or discretionary savings.)

Folks with greater financial resources make similar choices at different price points. Most of us, for example, buy cars based on the affordability of the monthly payment. We know that paying cash and buying a more expensive, more durable vehicle is better value but we choose not to do that because we deem the initial cost to be unaffordable.

I.e., an individual's financial resources constrain the range of goods he can consider as "best value" candidates.

Looking at camera gear, it's hard for me to argue that a new MP is not very good value for money, if the buyer has the resources to absorb the initial cost. Ample evidence exists that an MP will last a very long time, and, importantly, no new camera is going to make it obsolete. Second if: You gotta use the camera. No camera is value for money if it sits on a shelf being admired.
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This is well summed up in the old saying: 'the poor cannot afford to economise'

Cheers,

R
 
40oz said:
I'm not sure why some people use FSU equipment as some sort of whipping post. Why not use the typical P&S that have been coming out of Japan for the last 20-30 years as an example of total crap for far too much money?

Part of the problem with FSU cameras in the West is they are often rejects shipped west for low prices. Obviously if you pay bottom dollar for camera you can expect bottom dollar quality. How many times does someone post on this board about a Leica M needing work? I dare say it is nearly as often as a post about an FSU needing it, but how many FSU bodies are out there today? Millions, perhaps? Not so strange that the market might be saturated with examples that could do with some TLC and a CLA, I don't think.

Fix your camera. If you don't think an FSU body is worth fixing when you can buy another busted one for the price of repairs, fine. But at least acknowledge your own shopping habits and prejudices are the issue, not the cameras and lenses themselves.

I cannot understand the kind of logic that says that a camera from the Ukraine is not worth more than a $100 because I can buy a worn out version for less than that. I can buy a worn out Leica for $100, but who really thinks that's some sort of "good deal"? What kind of person would buy the cheapest beat-up Leica they could find on ebay and then tell everyone Leica cameras are crap for quality because they don't work?
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They're the whipping post because they are/were cheap. Cheap, as everyone "knows" must be poor quality. After all, would the buyer of that $1000 camera dare to admit that an FSU could compete? Hardly.

FSUs were indeed cheap, since they were state-sponsored and exported for currency. Unfortunately, quantity reigned over quality but even an originally-good example is unlikely to have been serviced since the value didn't justify it. End result is that the majority of FSUs are now both old and unserviced. As such, they are often to be found with problems, no real surprise there then.

I have a 1939 FED that still works properly. I've CLA'd it and replaced the mirror and curtains, both items that a 70-year old Leica/other make would likely need. I'm not going to claim it's of equivalent quality to a Leica but the mere fact that it still works well is testament to the robustness of its manufacture (or to Leica's, depending how you see it).

Those who view an FSU as a cheap, working camera are likely to get disappointed if they have failed to factor in the cost of a CLA, at least. FSU ownership is best for "tinkerers", as I am!
 
wolves3012 said:
FSUs were indeed cheap, since they were state-sponsored and exported for currency. Unfortunately, quantity reigned over quality but even an originally-good example is unlikely to have been serviced since the value didn't justify it. End result is that the majority of FSUs are now both old and unserviced. As such, they are often to be found with problems, no real surprise there then.
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Worse still, some have been 'serviced' by complete incompetents, so some that were OK a few decades ago are now ruined.

Cheers,

R.
 
Roger Hicks said:
Worse still, some have been 'serviced' by complete incompetents, so some that were OK a few decades ago are now ruined.

Cheers,

R.
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Roger,

A few friends in Prague learned quite a lot taking apart $10 FSU cameras. Quite often the service and sales people, when presented with a problem in a FSU piece of equipment, simply replied, "It is Russian".

Because they were low cost (cheap implies something quite different), people were not likely to invest the time and expense of proper service.

I also got a Kiev 88 to work, but it had 24,000 miles on it, after Kiev USA failed a few times, I returned it to Prague where I found some Ukrainians to send it back to their colleagues in Kiev to sort out the magazines, film advance, and install a new cloth shutter. The next owner was quite happy with it.

If you buy from someone who has low to no expectation of serviceability of the product, the outcome is unlikely to be the one you are looking for.

I do admire the guys here who can fix them and get them to work reliably, it is unfortunate so few of them seemed to work at the factory in Kiev who may have been putting them out by the kilo.

A few years back, an overhaul with new shutter curtains, in Prague was $25-$50 for one, so the reasonable procedure was to buy one and hope the tech guy was on his toes before you took it home.

You might get value for money, but depends also on the time it takes. The Kiev 88, two years. I hope the guy who bought it from me appreciates it though.

He is probably posting somewhere what wonderful cameras the Kiev 88 are. ;

Regards, J
 
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rxmd said:
I don't like cultural pessimism, it's too easy to lean back and say that everything used to be better in the past. In your sentence, complement "understand" by "or can afford", and figure in survivor bias - people used to buy cheap rubbish in the past as well, we just tend to forget that because the rubbish doesn't survive. Suddenly you will find that the world is more or less like it used to be.
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Word!

(since I have to type in a couple more characters to please the forum software, I might as well expound on my respond above, 'Word!' means 'I agree' or 'well-said').
 
Can I determine the "value for money" by dividing the number of good photographs made by a particular camera/lens by its cost?

;)
 
personally, I feel that value for money is very real, and my definition of value (in a camera) is a combination of two factors, reliability and image quality. Is a nikon d1 or d2 reliable, even today? Yes, they were specifically built to be able to take loads of abuse. Is the image quality up to my standard in a digital camera? for me, no. was the image quality of my leicas up to my standard? yes, but the reliability was not. Would a d3, a d3x, or an m9 be absolutely fantastic to own? absolutely, but the cost is too high (i will probably pick up a used d3 here in a couple years when the price drops). if I am honest, the single camera that represents the absolute best value for money would be the pentax k1000. they practically never break, and even if one has been horribly abused for decades, it is still incredibly easy to put them back to correct working order. the lenses available are fantastic for it, and the camera is incredibly cheap. imho, the camera the world is really waiting for is a digital version of the k1000, stripped down, rugged, with great image quality. Sure, the k1000 is pretty large for what it is, and sure it only came in chrome, and sure it didnt have even a self timer, but it is a cheap, bombproof camera that is perfectly capable of producing fantastic work. In the digital world currently, i think the d700 is the best value for the money. It is far from the cheapest, and it is far from the most expensive, but i feel it gives the best level of reliability and image quality for its price.
 
I doubt that there is an overall "best" of anything at all. If I'm doing portraits and you're doing landscapes, for instance, we'd have completely different needs in equipment. Different camera types, different lenses, maybe even different tripods. My "best" would be very different from your "best."
 
I think there was a thread on "quality" a few days ago and much of what was said there would also apply here.

Best value to me is the cheapest way of getting done for sure what you need to do.

What you need to do is of course very variable, so a 5Mpx four third camera can be perfect for a pro who never publishes anything larger than A4 and a digital back on a view camera can be barely enough for an amateur obsessed with large print but whether a camera does or not a certain thing reliably (and I put a stress on this point) is not an opinion or whether it cost more or less is also a fact.

For me good pro lines less popular with pros (for example the Olympus E series) are more "value for money" than cheaper versions of popular pro lines (like the midle of the line Canon or Nikon) even if possibly the latest in a internet review could take better pictures of a target in a one afternoon use because if I go out to take a picture I'd like to be sure I come back with one, but that is just my opinion and I know pros who work with three cheapish bodies.

GLF
 
Yes, we're looking at quite a number of different things:

1 The best camera for the job

2 Whether you can afford the best camera for the job

3 Even if you can afford it, whether you can get something 'good enough' for less

4 Your definition of 'good enough'

5 Pride of ownership, and trying to 'live up' to a camera. Yes, a good photographer can get better images with an indifferent camera than a bad photographer will get with a first-class camera, but a good photographer with a first-class camera is better placed still

6 'First class' brings us back to (1) again, the best camera for the job...

Cheers,

R.
 
I bought a cheap M2 some months back, fully working. good value for the money I guess (250€). last year I bought a canonet ql17 giii, fully working. I paid 15,- USD. having an M4 and an M2, I'm practically not using it but I could sell it for four times the price I bought it.
what's better value for the money?
 
SimonSawSunlight said:
I bought a cheap M2 some months back, fully working. good value for the money I guess (250€). last year I bought a canonet ql17 giii, fully working. I paid 15,- USD. having an M4 and an M2, I'm practically not using it but I could sell it for four times the price I bought it.
what's better value for the money?
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...and

7 Camera dealing

Cheers,

R.
 
I had a play on my mates Fed, and it just wasn't fun - clunky, heavy and not enjoyable at all. He hasn't done much shooting with it really, and gets very few results that he is happy with. Theres a spiral of less motivation, less practice hence less good results - I think rooted in the fact that the camera is just not fun to use.

But he is happy with the £10 camera and shooting infrequently because he doesn't want to afford a more expensive one.

As a beginner lets say - once you have fun with a machine, you get lots of practice and get better and perhaps want better quality kit to enhance the experience of taking pictures and probably the quality of those pictures. Perhaps the learning curve then levels off to a point and more expense is unnecessary.

As an amateur, having fun is the key - I think it is important to use equipment that will make shooting enjoyable. The value all depends on what you want to afford, and you will get the best value out of kit you enjoy using and hence use alot. It's a personal thing I guess!
 
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