The good from bad on ebay

joee · Joined: 28 Jun 2007 Posts: 9 Location: USA

I'm sure it's been brought up many times before but going through listings for lenses on ebay can be a real challenge in itself, you find very few decent pics, you ask for better pics but we all know how that goes, so how does one weed out the bad from the good.

You see the I�m selling for a friend lol, this is an estate find and all the others, you send questions off only to be not returned, you find the third party less common name lenses no one knows anything about, but mainly this is about the quality of those lenses.

Most having really poor pictures, poor description, some yellow with age making it hard to tell, you have no idea if there is fungus, if it focuses smooth, blades good, etc, does one just take a chance, pass it up, some have decent pics also but still somewhat hard to tell.

Just examples

Borges · Joined: 09 Mar 2007 Posts: 646 Location: Moers, Germany

You're right, but I see this as a game. Sometimes I loose, sometimes I win.
There are so many hidden gems hided in crappy auction pictures. And often the sellers think they get good money for garbage, laughing about you. They regard themselves as clever when they sold you a defect camera - the text was something like "I have no clue about this things, comes from my uncle... " - but they didn't realize that the lens is the real value and that they give away much money with their crappy descriptions and pictures. So the collector often laughs last.

On the other side I wouldn't buy an expensive lens in such an auction...

Michael