Spotmatic bodies expensive?

IronStar said:

@CGW & narsuitus
Come visit me in homeland of Yugo, we can find something for you! Maybe even non-rusted one!

*For the record Yugo was actually produced until November 2008, with minor facelift near the end of it's production. Facelift version "Yugo Koral In" looks quite nice to me. Yugos exported to USA were probably best built - imagine just how plain bad were ones for domestic market.*

-Stefan

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You were luckier than the poor souls who got stuck with the Trabant--a truly scary car.

Crazy thing is, East Germany (the country that produced the Trabant) had one of the highest standards of living of the Eastern Bloc countries. Which tells you how truly awful life was in the Soviet sphere during the Cold War. But that's way OT. The Spotties are good cameras, and probably worth every cent the free market values them at.

CGW said:

Just try finding a clean Yugo!

At least the jokes were funny:

What do you call a Yugo with a flat tire? Totaled.

What's included in every Yugo owner's manual? A bus schedule.

What do you call a Yugo that breaks down after 100 miles? An overachiever.

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How do you find parts for a Yugo? Follow another one down the road.

Tony-S said:

I was tooling around on KEH.com and saw this Spotmatic SP F body:

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More than $200 for one in EX+ condition? That seems crazy. I may have to dig mine out see what kind of condition they're in.

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I suppose this is because EX+ for KEH is on another class than "mint" or "excellent" on eBay or similar sites. In common parlance "mint" only means "very good conditions" or "no big marks".
Serious auction sites have a totally different approach. "Mint" actually means that there is no detectable sign of any kind (after inspection with the monocular, I suppose).
So an EX+ might be in very, very good condition.
If you need the camera to take pictures, anything working is fine.
If you are a collector every little sign of use matters.

Some people value virginity (and they pay for it! ).

Finding a Spotmatic and finding a Spotmatic F, are two entirely different things. I peruse thrift stores and swap meets constantly and find a Spotmatic of some kind probably every couple of weeks on average, and around 1 in 4 is in nice shape/solid working order. In all my time doing so I've yet to run across an F.

I have a Spotmatic, a Spotmatic II and a Spotmatic F. The II works but could use new seals/foam. The Spotmatic looks like it needs new curtains. The F needs unjamming. The F, like Mamiya's SX series, was an oddball. By the time they came out, bayonet mount cameras with full aperture metering had been around for a long time. The F, ES and ESII were all capable cameras but most people no longer wanted to screw in their lenses. Asahi then brought out their K mount cameras which at long last had the bayonet mount and full apertute metering but had feature sets which were nothing special. They were also somewhat large and heavy compared to the smaller SLRs from Fujica and Olympus. The smaller M series was more attractive but I question how much was really saved by leaving off manual shutter speed control from the original ME. I would rather pay a more modest price for a camera which is not in perfect shape and then get it serviced than pay more for one which I can't really be sure is in good condition other than cosmetically. All of these are old cameras and most of them suffer more from time and lack of use than from overuse. My Spotmatic F regret is that when I saw one with a grid screen I didn't buy it. I have grid screens for all of my cameras with interchangeable screens and have had custom installations done for some cameras which do not have interchangeable ones. My favorite AOC lenses? The 55/1.8 and 55/2 standard lenses in M42 and K mounts.

The difference between mint and the rest is considerable. A beaten up usable Nikon F2 will cost you £60. A very clean one ten times that, a truly* mint one, twenty. As others have said, glass case specimens attract a premium.

*finger marks only (not ebay 'mint')

I've often wondered why they were called Spotmatics, because they had no spot metering ability.

They were originally going to have spot meters but the design changed.

This from Wikipedia:

Despite the name, the camera did not use spot metering but it was originally to feature it exclusively as in the prototype Spotmatic shown at Photokina 1960 but at the last minute before release it was decided to change to average metering as Asahi feared that users would not know how to use a spot meter and blame the camera for the bad pictures.

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Steve.

Just for clarity, most Spotmatics have center-weighted metering. (I did not know the original ones had average metering).