Where is All the Film Camera Gear?

das

das

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Putzing around with film cameras for the past 20 years, and I have never witnessed such a desert for used film equipment as now. With the major retailers (apart from KEH) ditching selling all but the most recent higher-end used gear, and the incredible proliferation of many different sites that sell stuff (ebay, mercari, facebook, etsy, craigslist, fred miranda, this page, photrio, good grief!), it seems that nothing much desirable + affordable is for actually for sale anymore. Rare-ish (but not super rare) equipment that may have taken a few weeks to pop up somewhere years ago is now never popping up. And what is for sale - either sellers can't be bothered to test anything anymore (like put batteries in and fire a shutter), sellers want lots of money for mediocre stuff (like mid to lower tier 1970s and 1980s SLRs), or the big online shops want double or triple what the equipment cost even 10 years ago.

Where is all the camera equipment? :).
 
I purchased a lot (for me) in 2020. Nikon SLRs, LTM RFs. Normal prices. Working equipment. I went to LCS in 2020 and they had amazing deals. Prices not higher than they were.

But. If film prices are high jacked on semi-annual basis, why film gear prices must stay frozen at 10 years ago mark?
 
https://www.ebay.com/b/Film-Cameras/15230/bn_80709

Currently 96,974 listings on ebay alone under film cameras.
We are submerged under a tidal wave of choice for film cameras. It’s true, many might cost more than ten years ago, but they are still affordable. More expensive doesn’t mean unaffordable.
It would be hard to name any camera, even obscure ones, that one can’t have sent to your door in fairly short order if one so desired
Where are all the film cameras? That’s a question I have a hard time understanding.
Where are all the film cameras which are as criminally undervalued as they were immediately after digital took over? That’s a question, because those are mostly gone, but affordable cameras, almost any you might name are readily available by the hundreds if not thousands. Much too available, that’s the real problem, if my cabinets are any indication.
What camera, exactly, cannot be found?
 
The old stuff breaks over time and it's either too expensive to fix, or no one will fix it.
 
For me, one of the real downsides to all this is that camera retailers have become very dull places indeed for the most part because they are getting out (or have gotten out of) used equipment sales. Used gear was once a good reason for visiting a camera shop but nowadays you are just confronted with rows of boxes and a few new DSLRs and mirrorless cameras on display. Pity really, but for me, this move by the retailers is the end of an era when many of us enjoyed a good browse at favourite shops every week or so. TW
 
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.
 
Tony Whitney said:
For me, one of the real downsides to all this is that camera retailers have become very dull places indeed for the most part because they are getting out (or have gotten out of) used equipment sales. Used gear was once a good reason for visiting a camera shop but nowadays you are just confronted with rows of boxes and a few new DSLRs and mirrorless cameras on display. Pity really, but for me, this move by the retailers is the end of an era when many of us enjoyed a good browse at favourite shops every week or so. TW
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Years ago when I worked at a local shop, we did trade-ins for modest discounts, and sent most of the nicer stuff to KEH. What we kept to sell ourselves was mostly basic student grade stuff—K1000s, old T-mount zooms, and the like. Made sense in retrospect as everyone was getting out of film back then.

My current local shop (Glazer's up here in Seattle) has a decent used selection, but it's mostly digital/video and lenses with current mounts. Occasionally a Hasselblad or LF camera, and last I checked there was a very large Contax RX kit NIB that had been sitting for a while.

But go a few miles north to the Shot on Film Store, and its a paradise (though not for my wallet). Prices are a bit steeper than 'found in the wild' cameras, but they're all tested. Really wide selection, including things I'd never heard of or seen before. Folders that actually work (and aren't sitting on an instagrammable bookshelf). Alpa SLRs. The few f/0.95 RF lenses made. Even some oddball digital, or pre-digital gear like video-stills cameras. It's like a museum.

No affiliation; I just enjoy browsing, and they let me as long as I spend some cash on processing. Nice place to shoot the breeze if you want to talk about old gear—not very busy, and the owner is an encyclopedia. He goes on buying trips to Asia every now and then and brings back some amazing stuff. Nice if you don't want to hassle with international eBay orders.
 
Totally agree with you both. The days of the drop by and browse camera shop were wonderful. :). It's nice to hear that you still have some in your area.
 
davidde1000 said:
Where is all the camera equipment? :).
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Well summarized above ^^.
Living in NYC, I would regularly walk into Adorama and B&H to see what was on hand. Film stuff of good quality has indeed dwindled (Adorama no longer deals in M2/3/4 cameras) and am loathe to buy anything from flEaBay anymore because you haven't a clue what condition it's in when it arrives. Everything from East Asia is listed in Mint ++++ condition, whatever that really means.

Photo Tech, a Nikon repair shop in Manhattan has one repairman for film cameras who's retired but drops by every few weeks to work on what's accumulated. The paucity of parts and skilled people to work on these things makes all the buying a bubble-in-the-making. Bought a user R9 from LeicaStore SoHo 3 years ago and the mode/On/Off dial failed after 2 weeks. Two years ago picked up an unused R8 from KEH. It's a potential brick but I understood this going in.
 
Hey Ian, not to hijack the thread too terribly, but I used to love dealing with Glazer's back in the early 1990's. There was a guy there named Bill who went by the nickname Captain Canon and he had or could get pretty much any Canon FD equipment you could imagine. Good folks there, though I haven't dealt with them in decades.

Folks might also want to check out Igor at Igor Camera Exchange in Ohio. He's got a web site and a pretty impressive stock of old film gear.

Best,
-Tim
 
Tim—I'll hijack it back for a second...
Still a good group there; a number of guys I worked with down in Tacoma ended up there and have now since retired, but the current crew is great, and puts up with me hanging out for hours up in the lighting/film department. If you're ever out this way, check out the new store.

I'd heard many stories of this fabled Bill from back in the day. There's a newer guy with the same name and the same reputation, and the day I finally drop the cash on a new printer, I'm sure he'll be very happy.

Interestingly enough, I learned not long ago the University Bookstore had an entire camera department—bought a used book that had a receipt and a flyer advertising the 'new' Canon FT QL. They only stopped selling film and chemistry while I was in grad school there a few years back.
 
davidde1000 said:
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.
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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.
 
One way to save money is not to be too picky about brands and models.
Ricoh KR series had some perfectly serviceable cameras, several all manual so they work even without batteries. Still available used for under $50 is KR-5 and KR-5Super for not too much, less than 10 rolls of film.
Fujica ST605n is often useable, the 55mm f2.2 plastic focusing ring however has often disintegrated. Just a couple to consider, both with common lens mounts.
 
filmtwit said:
If no one is making new film camera's, then over time the heard thins.
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My comment about people wearing out was a joke, though it’s less of a joke to anyone my age.
And I’m aware of the fact that all the film cameras will eventually wear out, and that’s going to be a problem. But that’s a separate issue from the contention that film cameras today are either hard to come by, or so expensive that we can’t afford them. That’s what I was mildly objecting to, as it seems inaccurate to me.
 
Similar sentiment here, Larry. I haven't bought new-in-box gear in a very long time, and what I've spent on film gear out-of-pocket is far less than buying a new digital body. The shipping on my Fuji cost almost as much as the kit itself, though a year on I'm seeing prices on that oddball camera creep up too.

At least among 35mm lenses I've looked at, many have gone from 'you can't give them away' to 'slightly less than new' over the last decade, and like you said mirrorless has aided in that, especially certain sites that hype them, but still a net savings. And better people are using them than tossing them.

Lenses generally as a whole hold value more than bodies. Right now I'm sitting on two Nikon and one Canon DSLR from friends and family upgrading that didn't want to toss them and thought I'd get use out of them. Of course they kept the lenses...

But for my own film systems, things are cheap enough to buy a second backup body, if I really needed to. Lenses a different story.


What does surprise me is certain cameras/systems/parts skyrocketing in price for seemingly no reason. As I posted in a thread this summer, when my Bronica SQ was stolen, I started looking at replacements and was a bit shocked at how expensive film magazines and finders have gotten, but bodies and kits relatively cheap.

And thats the fun in this hobby, aside from making photos, I suppose—the hunt in finding what you want. But in essence no, I don't think there's any shortage of film bodies. I worry about that, 20 years on, searching the land for them. Then I have to remember there were millions made. I can stop in Goodwill on any day and find cheapie old Minoltas that may or may not work, and the nice stuff might be rarer and closely guarded by collectors like ourselves.
 
Larry Cloetta said:
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.
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I once traded an M6 body for a 645 kit. The body cost me about 800, sold the kit a couple of years later for $4k. The demand for the Contax was driven by wedding photogs who wanted to copy Jose Villa, who started a trend by shooting weddings with film. Imagine!

Another camera that has skyrocketed is the Xpan. $1200 or so with the 45mm lens, circa 2010, is now about $4500.

So, yes, there are some cameras that are hard to find and pricey, on the other hand, there are thousands of models that can be obtained for $30-$80...how about a basically new Nikon F80?

As for availability, Roberts (usedphotopro) is now rivaling KEH. There are many smaller vendors and boutique sellers.

I don't find it particularly difficult to find a specific model camera, but finding a really well-cared for example is a bit more of a challenge.

The days of individuals throwing grandpa's Leica kit on ebay for peanuts are pretty much over, however. Used to buy CLs with 40/2 all day long for $250-$300. Perfect M4 with 50/2 DR Summicron: $1000. Black paint M2: $100. At the time, seemed like there would be a never ending supply... :)
 
At least over this side of the pond, I don't think I've ever seen so much gear for sale ! Specially now, that people realized that their old cameras in the basement are actually worth something.
Also a lot more online stores like Kamerastore, which has literally hundreds of film cameras and lenses for sale.
A secondhand film camera store opened near my house last year.
 
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