Never compare auction prices (which sometimes are crazy, as seen on real life auctions) and business prices. Sometimes a business will price an item, and have it sit on a shelf for a year.
If film camera prices was going up, camera factories would put out brand new models. AFAIK they instead stop making film cameras.
If demand was up, the good old 1-hour print shops would spring up in todays economy where 1000's are laid off. I see none of that.
We are a dying breed. But we always experience something strange : whatever camera or film we are looking for in a dwindling market *someone else* is looking for also, so we are outbidding each others. This is like wimmins dresses, interes sways to and fro' prices go up and down, and its user-driven. Banter on places like this fuels the imagination, we suddenly sees a write-up of a long forgotten camera, and suddenly demand *explodes*, instead of the noraml 5 interested blokes, 75 are now bidding, which drives the prices through the roof.
One simple example, a local photo web-site here, normally catering for digital cameras, had a well written and lavishly presented write-up of the Olympus OM system, models, lenses, winders and so on. All of a sudden *everyone* should have one, local prices here skyrocketed, and demand exploded noticeably in the UK also. Normally this should have been impossible, we are so few people, we normally would not make a dent in the UK market. But in all truth, the market is now so small, that anything exeptional happening, can make prices seem exploding or falling throuh the floor.
And the rule of the thumb is as always in antiques : what you are looking for is bound to be expensive, what you are trying to sell to finance your next good buy, will always be half of what you expected, which already was half of what you got it for!
Happy hunting, its the Hunt!
Erik
n FleaBay.
and a MD4 at $150.00
