Seeing a few bargains

walter g · Joined: 20 Feb 2010 Posts: 2463 Location: NC, USA

I had stopped buying lenses because I wasn't seeing any deals in the lenses I'm still looking for. Some higher end deals I did see, but not in the budget right now.
Except the two lenses I got in December for my birthday and Christmas. Which were both over my normal budget , I haven't bought any lenses sense August last year.
Trying to find bargains under $30 shipped is getting difficult. It use to be easy.

I didn't buy any lenses this month but did see a few deals, but unfortunately I already had nice copies of them.

walter g · Joined: 20 Feb 2010 Posts: 2463 Location: NC, USA

Are we nearing the end of the great low end deals, Or are we just on another price cycle, and lower prices are around the corner.?

benadamx · Joined: 25 Feb 2019 Posts: 329

i suspect as a result of covid, people are sitting on the auction sites all day because they can (i know i have been), and once folks have to go back to the office we'll start seeing better deals and less competition again.. maybe

we've just started having flea markets here again in the last few weeks, and i've been finding cool bargains and weird stuff just like the old days

calvin83 · Joined: 12 Apr 2009 Posts: 7554 Location: Hong Kong

Good deals are hard to find in auction sites theses days. Need some luck to find good deals as they disappear faster than in the old days. Wink

tb_a · Expire: 2019-08-28

I think it's much more difficult to find good deals because the system camera market shiftet totally to mirrorless (except Pentax) which dramatically increased also the demand for adaptable lenses hence new original high-tech lenses are very expensive.
In addition electronic AF adapters are nowadays available which enable the use of MF lenses in AF mode as well; i.e. they are very easy to use for everybody.
As a consequence good MF lenses are harder to find for little money.
At least that's my impression.

Pancolart · Expire: 2013-11-18

Not everyone invests into Bitcoin and lenses are next best thing Smile

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tb_a · Expire: 2019-08-28

e6filmuser · Joined: 12 Nov 2010 Posts: 582 Location: Reading UK

alex ph · Joined: 16 Mar 2013 Posts: 1571

But if you have too many of them, you never remember well in which direction you should turn the "dial" to focus.

blotafton · Joined: 08 Aug 2013 Posts: 1554 Location: Sweden

iangreenhalgh1 · Expire: 2014-01-07

Bitcoin is a scam, lenses are a tangible asset, so infinitely more valuable.

jamaeolus · Expire: 2015-08-20

I have only been at this for about 5 years and I have definitely noticed fewer treasures. They are still out there yo just have to scan through more auctions with lots of cheap junk. More people have learned to figure out what a lens might be worth also more people are not putting for auction just BIN.

invisible · Joined: 06 Jun 2013 Posts: 343

Ebay fees for lenses have almost doubled in the last decade. I might be off but I think they went from 6% to 10%. That must have helped to push the prices up another bit.

cooltouch · Joined: 15 Jan 2009 Posts: 9097 Location: Houston, Texas

I wish I had a crystal ball that I could use to predict future prices and demand for manual focus lenses. But all I can do is make guesses based on past trends. And past trends indicate a significant rise in prices. With respect to a small selection of "benchmark" lenses I like to check prices on, since I began collecting MF lenses some 12 years ago, prices have more than doubled in many cases. In a few cases they've stayed the same and even gone down a bit (mostly normal lenses with respect to the latter). I'm also seeing prices that have increased by 50-100% over the past two years with a few other focal lengths. So, on average, the overall trend is up.

Now, as to why this is the case, I think there are many factors at play here. Perhaps one of the most significant factors is that MF lenses are a finite resource and the best ones are becoming harder to find. For years I used to think of MF lenses as being an almost limitless resource because so many millions of them were made, but attrition is a real thing and it has obviously had an impact. When you couple this with increased demand and competition for the cleanest examples, higher prices are inevitable.

I was fortunate. I was binge-collecting back when prices for the good stuff were cheap. In more recent years I've become much more selective and now I find myself asking myself, "Do I really need that lens?" Usually, the answer is no, but that doesn't always prevent me from buying it anyway. It's more a matter of want than need. So, LAS is still a real thing for me, just not as much of a compulsion as it once was.

Sciolist · Expire: 2021-04-16

tb_a · Expire: 2019-08-28

calvin83 · Joined: 12 Apr 2009 Posts: 7554 Location: Hong Kong

eggplant · Joined: 27 May 2020 Posts: 516

28mm and 24mm lenses are watched like hawks... very difficult to nab anything of the sort for under £10. Here is a case in point-

Is it really that special? Can't some people watching stump up £30 instead? Like, I get wanting to nab a bargain, but eventually you'll be waiting months for that bargain,

I blame how much hype M42 has recieved for being the see-all, do-all adaptable mount, which is pretty unfair given how life went on after 1975. Maybe some of this is inherited because everyone moved to bayonet, called screw-mounts 'old', and then this came back to being 'ubiqitious'.

But we should spread our attention when talking about adaptable mounts amongst OM, PK and M42 for starters, not all pile onto M42. It's just becoming annoying and making pricing points incomprehensible- for £5-10 more you could easily nab a BIN copy, and then for £20-30 more you're into a new world of often far better lenses. I just don't understand it.

Gardener · Joined: 22 Sep 2013 Posts: 950 Location: USA

It's a fluctuating market. For example, prices on 135mm Nikkors and 135mm V2 Takumar seem to have eased off but their 105mm brethren got more expensive. Rokkors 35/1.8 dropped in price from high 200's to low 100's (very temporary I am sure), but Canons 35/2 are getting insane, a nFD copy was sold today for $650. Nikkor-O 35/2 got out of its $50 abyss, but Nikkor 85/2 trending towards $100.

calvin83 · Joined: 12 Apr 2009 Posts: 7554 Location: Hong Kong

I bought this on Feb from a seller who have a brick and motor camera shop. It is one of the lens I am looking for few years. The price may not be the cheapest but the condition of the glass is very good.

stevemark · Joined: 29 Apr 2011 Posts: 3754 Location: Switzerland

alex ph · Joined: 16 Mar 2013 Posts: 1571

To my knowledge, there are three different trends in ebay segment of MFL trades, which is certainly different from local boards, as ebay imposes a more clearly "global market" price model.

I ascertain that prices for some lenses oscillate wave-like in ebay. For example, a year or some ago Hexanon 1.8/40 was pretty affordable, under 40 euros or dollars. It now turned back to median 50-70 in sold lists. On the contrary, if someone living in the USA desired to try a Printing Ektar by Kodak, it's a good moment. There are several BIN offers at around 20-30 dollars (and you still may make a lower offer), while two years ago they were traded for around 70-120. There are no large hypes around these lenses, mostly local explosions of interest. So when such an explosion passes away, they become more affordable.

Some massively produced lenses like for instance Helios increment progressively in price in the recent years. As compared to 5 years ago the median price must be doubled. But that is certainly not because of its rarity, beu for the reason of a generalized market effect, which incline prices for "basic" items inflate. I presume that Helios might be compared to bread or milk at alimentary market. Anyone entering the MFL realm gets very soon an advice to try Helios as the cheapest (no more) and the funniest first lens. So, Helios may serve a generalized measure of MFL prices, like in economy there is a metrics measuring cross-country relative prices in BigMacs.

While some lenses and marks went to the hands of professional resellers in ebay years ago. Something like Sonnar 1.5/50 or its brother Jupiter is very rarely seen in the wild, mostly in BIN option by professionals. I assume prices for these lenses did not change much, in spite of general inflation effects. Just because their public is pretty restrained, as the sellers club.

calvin83 · Joined: 12 Apr 2009 Posts: 7554 Location: Hong Kong

vivaldibow · Expire: 2021-03-09

D1N0 · Joined: 07 Aug 2012 Posts: 2495

At some point the vintage lens resource is going to be depleted and people are going to have to wait for us hoarders to die :p