There is certainly alot of stuff for sale but if you really are looking for something desirable in particular, you will find that a big percentage of the cameras are "untested" or "as-is" and what is somewhat "guaranteed" to work is selling for alot of money. I do not think that Nikon EMs/FAs, Canon AE-1s, Pentax K1000s, etc., etc. have been traditionally undervalued or are today.
Maybe some examples will help. How many Contax C/Y 21mm 2.8 lenses are for sale out there and how much do they cost? How much are Mamiya 6/7 cameras and lenses selling for? How much are Leica M6s selling for? Would you think that later Konica AR f/22 lenses would be very hard to find and cost hundreds of dollars? KEH does not even to seem to have that much rare stuff in stock anymore. Yes, you can buy what you want, but the prices on desirable things (if you can even find them for sale) as well as the junk are skyrocketing. The increasing prices are at least partly related to the lack of readily-available supply.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Pentax-K10...44188edbbfadb8e33c2f|ampid:PL_CLK|clp:2334524
There’s a K1000 for $212 with a 3 month warranty. Most Working K1000 bodies go for under $200. I am not seeing how that is expensive or unaffordable. 15 years ago these would have been readily available for under $100, so it’s true that costs have gone up.. That’s what I meant about being undervalued in the past, because at $80 these were just as good as they are now at $200, so, undervalued.
I bought my first Contax 139 the year they were introduced. From personal experience, the 21/2.8 was always very expensive, from the get go, which is why I never owned one, and always rare. That, as a current day example is not really representative of the entire film camera market, IMO. It’s also not representative because film body
lenses actually have jumped in price with the introduction of mirrorless bodies which made them useful for digital shooters. That’s the market that actually took off. This has nothing at all to do with either the availability or price of film
bodies, which was the topic at hand.
I just yesterday sold a very nice Contax 139 Quartz body, perfect mirror, new seals, new covering, accurate meter, shutter speeds right on, for $104 on ebay. Average selling price for these very capable cameras is $70. Today. Ten years ago, they were $30-40, the price of a bad dinner for 4 at McDonalds, so I guess that’s “skyrocketing”, but the whole sky is falling thing, I don’t really get.
And that time when Leica M6’s were cheap, I must have missed that. Cheaper, yes, and yes there is still a supply and demand curve operating in the world, but we are a long way from the day when people of average income can’t buy the film camera they want.
It’s true there are a few select cameras which have experienced rising prices more than most, Mamiya 7 would be one, Blads are another, but there are tons of options out there that are very affordable.
Contax 645s, though, now that’s, I think, the only camera I can think of that has actually skyrocketed. Whew. Now regretting I sold my backup body a few years ago.
My main point is that nice film cameras are easy to come by, and that’s unlikely to change any time soon. The specific one we might want was likely cheaper 5 years ago, but so what. Compared to the latest full frame or medium format digital wondercam, film camera bodies are still cheap as chips. We should be counting our blessings.
