Your best deal ever?

[darinwc]

Oh and a Yashica T4 for $2... sold for $150.. a week later i found another T4 for $2

..One think I find impossible to find locally is a nice used tripod.. they are all the crappy wobbly ones with plastic heads and no QR plate.

[Mr.3D]

Best deal by far was a Leica M1 with a Elcan 90mm/1.0 lens attached for $1000.00. Still have the M1 sold the lens on Ebay about 4 years ago for $15000.00 to some guy in Italy.


Here is a post I made to a Leica Forum about the lens and a photo.

http://www.l-camera-forum.com/leica-.../2/204505.html


B

[David A. Goldfarb]

I consider my 8x10" Sinar P with an extra long custom bellows a pretty good deal at $850.

I traded a box of 50 sheets of slightly past date 4x5" Provia 100F with a friend for a Voigtländer Petzval of around 10"/f:4. It turned out to be a good deal for both of us. My friend had gotten the lens as part of a trade with a camera store that went out of business, and I'd bought more of this short dated film than I could use, and a fair number of the shots that appeared in my friend's first book were made with that film.

Best deal ever was two Nagra miniature spy recorder sets I bought on eBay from a state government surplus liquidator for $90. They didn't use the brand "Nagra" anywhere in the description, and they misspelled "Kudelski." The photo was blurry and the description wasn't much more than "two tape recorders, condition unknown." I bought a projector from the same source, so I just found the Nagras accidentally, browsing through the seller's other listings. I recognized them as Nagras and figured they would be worth more than what I paid for parts, even if they didn't work. As it happened they were used in law enforcement and worked quite well. I didn't need two, so I sold one for a bit more than $1900. The other one I thought I would use to record sound for Super-8, so I kept it for a few years, bought an A/C power supply and new tapes for it for around $200, used it occasionally to record talks and lectures, and sold it eventually for $2600.

[darinwc]

Wow, I had no idea tape recorders still held any value. Were they reel-to-reel type or cassettes?

[Sparky]

Sweet deal on the Nagras, David...!! A bit of a fan myself... ever seen a Nagra T?? crazy machines...!

One of my sweetest and most memorable was getting a micromega critical focuser (the high end one - see also 'Peak') for $5 at a yard sale - being sold as a 'childrens microscope'.

[Sparky]

Wow, I had no idea tape recorders still held any value. Were they reel-to-reel type or cassettes?

I know a guy who mortgaged his house for a Nagra recorder with ruby guides... I think at the time (80s) they selling for around $60-80K....

they're reel to reel machines, of course...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=155ow-iLV9g

[David A. Goldfarb]

The Nagra SN series used open reel tapes the same width as cassette tape. The earliest models predated cassettes.

You can see one of the Nagras I had here--

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscell...s_rare_gadgets

Click on "Top Rated" and scroll down.

There's a great scene in the movie, Diva, where the obsessed opera fan is making a recording and says "Nagra. Very, very sensitive." They could be synched to film, so the 1/4" recorders were very much the standard in the film industry for many years, well into the era of digital recording. I've seen a Nagra III that belonged to Dizzy Gillespie.

[telkwa]

Pentax LX with A50/1.7 & B+W Top-Pol filter for $175 CDN (about $140 US at the time).

[bdial]

One think I find impossible to find locally is a nice used tripod.. they are all the crappy wobbly ones with plastic heads and no QR plate

True 99.9% of the time in my experience. However, I bought a Linhof heavy duty pro (their biggest) with its geared center column and a pan head at a yard sale. It ranks very high in my list of good deals.

[Sirius Glass]

True 99.9% of the time in my experience. However, I bought a Linhof heavy duty pro (their biggest) with its geared center column and a pan head at a yard sale. It ranks very high in my list of good deals.

I got a good heavy one on evilBay directly from Amvona at a great price and I keep it in one of my cars. It is so heavy that I rarely use it.

Steve