EXACTLY how I get my camera bargains — and you can too!
I’m quite adept at bargain hunting, if I do say so myself. It’s a skill I’ve honed through years of being a cheapskate, basically. And I thought it was about time I showed you the ways. Here are my thoughts and tips on hunting down bargain cameras.
Just a disclaimer… This blog post is sponsored by NO one, and this advice is definitely not endorsed by any of places mentioned. Use common sense and be vigilant in case of scammers. OK? OK.
First things first…What makes a bargain?
You can watch this video here, or carry on reading.
So how does a bargain even exist today, in the land of free and easy information?
Well… I believe a bargain occurs when there is a deficit of two things:-
- A deficit of knowledge,
- and/or a deficit of patience.
For example, some grandma running a charity shop sticks 28 cameras online for £16. She doesn’t have the knowledge on the individual cameras to sell them individually. (and I bought them, yay! True story. Free postage too.)
Or, some bloke on Facebook marketplace wants to go to Benidorm in two weeks and sells his camera at a really low price because he needs a quick sale. He lacks the patience to wait and get the best price for it.
So keep that in mind.
This is why we don’t often find bargains in actual camera shops. They have the knowledge, and they definitely have the patience to wait for the right buyer. As fun as these shops are to look around, you’re probably not going to get a crazy bargain there. So where to look first?
Online Auctions
eBay, for the sake of argument. Let’s start there. But I’m sure other sites exist. Here are some tips and tricks that have helped me a ton in the past.
First of all, if you have a specific camera or lens in mind, you can search on eBay and filter your results to show all the recently sold items. This is SO valuable, because you can see how often things crop up, what they go for on average, and whether there are massive price fluctuations.
For example, I bought a Lumix CM1 for £100 on eBay, but before I bought it, I did a quick search. There were some listings that were outrageous, over a thousand pounds, but when I filtered the results by recently sold, there was only one, and it was from over a month back.
This told me that this item is pretty rare at the moment, and while the £100 auction wasn’t quite as good as the £68 auction that had completed a month back, it was certainly better than the rest on the market, which are going for £200 plus.
Now, if I’d searched and seen that they routinely sold for under £100, I would know that was a bad buy. Similarly, if I’d seen that they usually go for £200, then bargain trousers! Buy buy buy!
You can use this information to help you decide, and weed out any impulse purchases.
Remember: people can list items for any price they like, it doesn’t mean people are actually buying them at those prices. Similarly, people can be lazy — have no patience! — and set a really low price without doing research themselves. So it’s well worth taking the time to check.
eBay Game 1: Newly Listed
There are two eBay games that I like to play, and both exploit the bargain hunting rules: lack of knowledge and lack of patience.
When you’re search, you can search for a specific item, or a broad category. Personally I go as broad as “camera” or “lens”. I’d rather scroll through some irrelevant things than miss something interesting.
Once you’ve found your search term, filter your results to “Newly Listed”. This shows the latest auctions that most people haven’t seen yet. Now, there’s one more thing you need to do, and that’s filter to “buy it now”. here we have a first class ticket to all the people who lack patience. Buy It Now sellers don’t want to wait a week for the anticipation to build.
And if this lack of patience happens to coincide with a lack of knowledge? Well, then you’re the first eyeballs on the listing, and you can buy it before anyone else even notices.
eBay Game 2: Ending Soonest
So then, at the other end of the spectrum, we have “Ending Soonest”. Warning: this is like drugs. It’s such an adrenaline fuelled hobby and has gotten me in so much trouble in the past!
If you search ending soonest, you see the listings with just seconds or minutes to go. So you’ve got to act quick. Here, you can find some bargains, but just beware that these listings have been up for a week or more, so if people haven’t ramped up the price yet, there might be a good reason for it. So use caution, but snipe away if something catches your eye.
Tip one: trying this at different times of day can be interesting. Some ill-fated midday ending auctions will have fewer eyeballs on them than, say, 7pm on a Sunday.
Tip two: try to wait until you’re within the final 30 seconds of the auction before bidding for maximum bargain hunting.
Electronics buyers and sellers
Companies like MPB, or here in the UK, CEX — and I think a newer company on the scene is Gear Focus — will give you a handy dandy website to browse. Here you can see what stock they have, and the condition it’s in.
You can sometimes find mad bargains if you look at “good” condition, as opposed to “excellent”. This means they’re still in working order (and will still have some form of warranty!) but have some cosmetic damage.
I bought the Olympus EM5 as “Good” when it was literally pristine, because it had the rubber eye cup missing. I bought the missing part for about £2 and saved about £100 on the camera.
On MPB, just because I shop there a lot — again, NOT sponsored (but check them out in the links below if you like! They are excellent and they do sponsor some of my videos) — you can press “cameras” in the menu, and then search low to high to see some really interesting things from all brands.
MPB here:-
MPB UK: https://geni.us/ST2V
MPB US: https://geni.us/STZ48b5
MPB EU: https://geni.us/dOkLk0z
spares and repairs
If you want a project, or if you have an abundance of patience, you can research simple fixes for certain cameras. I took a punt on a Lumix GH2 recently that was listed as spares and repairs, and all it took was swapping out the third party battery to make it work again. (video on this project here!)
This won’t always be the case, and ya know, use common sense, but it can be a fun hobby if this sort of thing appeals to you. You could definitely find some bargains this way.
For instance, the Instax Wide 300 is notorious for breaking and giving off a groaning sound. But the fix is really simple, you just have to open the back and put the lens mechanism back on its rails. There are quite a few in the used market that I bet you could buy and fix up. But, of course, you don’t always know if that’s the fault, or if it’s the only fault, so there are always risks involved.
In the real world
Now, I’ve mentioned that camera shops aren’t the best places for bargains, but what about other shops? Cash converters in the UK — I suppose, it’s the equivalent of a pawn shop in America? — And of course charity shops, thift stores, and markets.
Shops like Cash Converters have their own systems for logging products so it can sometimes be tricky to find a good deal, but, let’s imagine an Olympus EM5 mkii comes into the shop, and all the different models look bloody identical, and the rushed member of staff logs it as an EM5 mki instead…
Stranger things have happened. It’s always worth a look!
Markets and antiques places are always a great spot for both lack of knowledge and lack of patience. There’s a place in the North West here called Bygone Times, and I go there a few times a year just to check out the cameras. It really is a lottery, but you can sometimes find great things.
Unregulated private sales
Think Facebook market place, or Gumtree, or Craigslist. Here we’re in the wild wild west. You CAN find bargains, but also there are scammers, and time wasters.
This is my last resort, to be honest, but I know a lot of people do have success in places like this. Just, always use common sense and caution. Some people have great success here, but it takes a bit of haggling, and a lot of intuition.
Importing!
I’ve recently discovered Buyee, an importing website for Japanese stuff. Here you can browse their aution sites and private listings, and Buyee will (in theory) sort out customs for you for a small fee and post it out to you.
This is like eBay, where you’re buying off loads of individual sellers, and not from Buyee directly — they’re just the middle man — so if you’ve heard bad stuff about Buyee, it’s likely that people are blaming them and not the actual sellers. in my experience it’s been really really good.
You can find cameras and lenses really cheap, but you are effectively rolling to dice here. One, on the individual seller, and then two, on customs charges.
I bought my hideous gold Lumix GH1 from Buyee, and also a pink GF7.
The GH1 got through absolutely fine, so I got it for a really good price, but I got a further customs charge on the GF7 of I think about £40, so it sort of negated the bargains.
so, yes, it seems legit, but there are risks.
Also… I managed to convert my GF7 from Japanese to English by what can only be described as hacking the matrix. But unfortunately there’s no fix for the GH1. so. It’s Japanese. Yay!
So there are some avenues for you to explore.
I would say that while it takes a lack of knowledge and patience to lose money as a seller, it takes an abundance of knowledge and patience to succeed as a buyer.
So be patient,
do your research,
have a mooch intermittently of an evening when you’re watching TV.
And most importantly, have fun with your bargain hunting!