Inflation on Steroids - Camera Repair and Service Pricing

Pinholes rule!

Bill Burk said:

There’s always some challenge. The old scope had fritzed on me decades ago so I put it away until now. On a rheostat I found it was fine at 80 volts line power. Mouser came through with some high voltage capacitors and the first one worked, got it on the line now.

Although this reveals shutter time, it doesn’t measure curtain speed.

I’ll need a two sensor arrangement to get that info.View attachment 312889

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Love the Kenwood scope, beautiful piece of equipment.

awty said:

Love the Kenwood scope, beautiful piece of equipment.

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Thanks awty! I like your recent media too!

As for buying cameras for repair: I highly recommend buying cameras that look mint. Send them to a tech for CLA before you even look at it.

Although there is "always" something wrong with the camera, the hardware pieces are often in great shape. A few times I have found the camera only had 'one' broken part... that broke shortly after first buyer got the camera... so they put it away and never used it.

Conversely, I have been sternly advised by a reputable camera repair person to "never do it again" when I bought an absolute trash camera and had it drop-shipped to be repaired. While I love my ratty Ikonta, the poor repairman had a devil of a time loosening the front element to clean the lens.

flavio81 said:

Doing a proper "CLA" on a SLR camera can easily take more than 5 hours of almost-non-stop, no-interruptions-allowed work. Or days. This will involve stripping the camera completely, cleaning (which might involve ultrasonic cleaning or removing all kinds of stubborn gunk), relubing, checking shutter curtain times and readjusting tension, renewing curtain brakes if there are bounce problems, checking flange-to-rail length and paralellism, checking or readjusting focusing screen for correct focus, same for mirror angle, readjusting metering for the whole range (dark, middle, bright EVs), Then assembling everything again, some parts have specific positions and tolerances... If the camera has an AE circuit you also nee sure it's exposing correctly, no matter what the meter reads. And then there's the light seals topic, which isn't trivial on some machines. I'm sure i'm leaving things out right now.

Just multiply time for a reasonable hourly rate and you'll have an idea of how to charge.

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That is the point I was trying to make.

A master auto technician charges between 80 and 100€ per hour, a master electrician 45-75€ etc. etc.

I'm pretty sure the costs are comparable in North America.

Sirius Glass said:

But then you know that you have a good camera. Running out and buying another camera instead results in a camera of unknown condition and back as square one with an extra camera.

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That's the logic I've been using.

As a bit of background, I only started taking photography seriously and shooting film about 4 years ago, so I missed out on the golden age of film and film cameras. I've been making up for lost time by amassing a small collection of film cameras to experience them for the first time. It's fun and the cost of entry isn't that high in many cases - Japanese mechanical SLRs, for example. With a little over $100 invested in a camera body in good condition, plus about the same for a CLA by a good tech, that's not a lot of $$$ to get a high-quality, serviced camera that should last for years.

Case in point, I recently picked up a black Pentax KX from an eBay seller. The camera seems to be working pretty well, but the meter is a bit wonky and doesn't always turn on when it should, there's some dust/dirt in the viewfinder, etc. It's a 50+ year old camera so I wasn't expecting perfection. I could just leave the camera as-is and live with its few flaws, but I'd prefer it to be in proper working condition so I'll send it off for repair. Sure, I might end up spending more than some feel the camera is worth, but so what? It's still relatively inexpensive and I'll enjoy using it more if it's all working as it should be. And should I decide to sell it at some point in the future, I'll have a no-excuses camera that I can pass on to the next user with confidence. Seems like a no-brainer to me.