Am I missing something - why are those crappy P&S film cameras so expensive

[Raymond Lin]

I am not talking about the like sof Nikon 35TI but more in lines of those basic black plastic ones that are nothing more than a disposable, they go from £50...some cost hundreds and hundreds on eBay, going up to couple of thousands!

What am I missing? Are these collectibles like CRT TV and VHS players or something? I understand if people want to shoot film but there are a lot of proper SLR for the same if not cheaper, with much better lenses.

What am I missing? Is it purely that they don't make them anymore and it is fashionable?

 

[Karl.t1965]

Some of those rather expensive P&S cameras had rather nice lenses. They are an easy step into film photography and very portable, add hipster factor and up go prices.

 

[AndrewFlannigan]

..., they go from £50...some cost hundreds and hundreds on eBay, going up to couple of thousands!

There is a theory that the latter adverts are not aimed at the general public but may be a not so clever attempt at naughtiness. The last time I was forced to do a money laundering course at a bank, this was mentioned as something to be reported if seen in a transaction.

I hasten to add that I was strictly back office and the closest I got to a till was from the other side of the safety glass!

 

[Count Arthur Strong]

Street photography is very popular atm as it's easy to do (as opposed to do well) and SLRs tend to be a bit in your face. For anyone wanting to dip their toes into street with a film camera plastic P&S is pocketable and can be a good starting point, but I do get your comment about the mad prices.

 

[FishyFish]

It depends on the model. Most point & shoot cameras are still relatively cheap to buy second hand, but once you factor in the power of social media, the prices can skyrocket. Someone will produce a video on how camera X is the best point and shoot out there and their followers will all rush out and buy them, and so the prices rise. Some of these cameras are good, as @Karl.t1965 says - the Contax and some Yashica compacts for example had very good lenses and lots of features, such as manual control, but others are more run of the mill and their prices have been similarly inflated by hype.

The Olympus Mju II / Stylus Epic is probably the best known example of this. A few years ago you couldn't move for YouTube videos and bloogers extolling the virtues of this little Olympus point-and-shoot and the price went through the roof. Not only for the particular model in question, but also dragging the cost of the other, perhaps lesser, cameras in the range upwards at the same time. I've never used one, but expect that it is a perfectly capable pocket camera that can produce good images* but I also suspect that it's probably no better than equivalent cameras from the likes of Canon, Pentax etc. It's just been elevated by hype.

It's not just point-and-shoots affected. For instance, stuff like the Canon AE1 SLR, the Leica M6, and the Mamiya RZ67 have also seen their prices increase quite dramatically over what they once were based on online popularity.

* As can pretty much any camera in the right hands.

 

[AndrewFlannigan]

Canon AE1 SLR ... also seen their prices increase quite dramatically over what they once were based on online popularity.

This is true.

I bought my AE1 with a not too bad Vivitar 28~70mm lens for £12 about ten years ago. Going by ebay, I could sell it now for five to ten times that price!

 

[excalibur2]

Well you might be thinking of plastic fantastic brownies, but have tested quite a few decent compact cameras of all makes and they all give VG results....but the only one I wasn't impressed with was an Olympus with a zoom lens after seeing pictures that my wife took..ok it could be my wife's fault?
Annoyingly I threw the camera in the bin recently as I thought it had stopped working after trying two 3v batteries in it, but later was checkiing another camera, that uses a 3v battery, and that didn't work either .......checked the voltage and it was over 3v but the batteries had no power to deliver any current

 

[The Oldun]

The Olympus mju-II with the fixed focal length f2.8 lens goes for hundreds of pounds and I assume it is because it is pocketable, looks pretty and has a good lens. The younger vloggers love it. The mju-II zooms don't command such high prices but are still quite expensive. I have a Zoom 80 and the lens is very good, but like all the zooms, there is a design fault: The front element isn't recessed in the lens body and if there are any bright spots in the shot you get very sharply defined flare in the corners. I have seen many examples of this on Flickr and it is mentioned quite a bit in Group discussions. I bought mine for less than a fiver at a boot sale and I expect to sell it shortly on ebay for at least £80.

I also have a Konica Z-Up 70 I bought for a pound at the market which gives results at least as good as the mju-II, without the flare problem, but is ugly and has no real resale value.

 

[TCR4x4]

On Reddit, pretty much every other post on the photo subs are about crappy 90s point and shoots. That “look” seems to be very much the trend now, so what a few years would have been thrown away are now becoming very popular.

Even mid 2000’s digital point and shoots are shooting up in value.

 

[BADGER.BRAD]

What am I missing? Is it purely that they don't make them anymore and it is fashionable?

If your trying to be trendy I offer a free recycling service for your modern digital rubbish, if you send Your Sony a9 million to me for recycling I'll even send you a top of the range 1980's or 90's plastic heap of junk as a replacement with a free toffee and dog hair coated lens !

 

[Edman]

Most film era P&S cameras were indeed crappy. But some were not. A few had a fixed prime lens that was actually sharp in the 35-40mm range with mostly f/2.8 apertures, but something like a Konica Hexar AF had a 35mm f/2 lens.

Now, since this is essentially full frame, a 35mm f/2.8 actually gives you certain amount of depth of field control. Its equivalent to a 23mm f/2 lens on APS-C or a 17mm f/1.4 on m4/3. That's actually the equivalent of a Fuji X100 series camera. Some of these cameras also have some manual control. For example, the Contax T2 can shoot aperture priority.

Something like an Olympus Mju II also weighs very little - I think it was 150 grams. You can carry it around much easier than a modern mirrorless camera. When you pull it out to take pictures, the reaction from people is completely different, they don't compose themselves. I recently bought a picture book from a photographer mostly shot on a Mju II, its doubtful that its pictures could have been produced on anything but a 35mm P&S, because the people in the pictures look as if disarmed.

At the same time, there is only so much supply of these old cameras, so any increase in demand leads to a disproportionate increase in price. Another aspect of all this is that these cameras break down and are quite hard to repair, so invariably they are getting scarcer, driving up price. Lets be honest, a lot of people buying these (and basically all photo gear) simply have GAS and have no use for them, so more and more of these are ending up in collector's cupboards, which also drives up price. Some of these cameras are so expensive, they are basically collectables (hello, Contax T3) and their actual use makes no sense.

 

[trypdal]

What am I missing? Are these collectibles like CRT TV and VHS players or something? I understand if people want to shoot film but there are a lot of proper SLR for the same if not cheaper, with much better lenses.

What am I missing? Is it purely that they don't make them anymore and it is fashionable?

I mean 'crappy' (as in poorly designed/poor value/etc) consumer electronics items have existed for many years and I think will keep existing.

One example just to stay in the photography field. How about those crappy first generation Fuji X-trans sensor-based mirrorless cameras? Thousands and thousands of £ for what exactly - for an inferior sensor that's essentially incapable of properly rendering detail even via its own in-camera jpgs. Used to fall one for one of these crappy products some years ago. A Fujifilm XT-10 with a tiny (and objectively nicely made) 27mm Fujifilm pancake.

Well - the rendering of complex detail in the crappy X-trans sensor in that camera was spectacularly bad: trees, bushes, leaves, rocks: they all had a 'wormy/swirly' look, the problem was so well known that articles were written about the so called 'Painterly effect'. Incredible that a major company would release such a flawed sensor. And the Fuji fanboys in denial would tell you to just shoot raw and then purchase some other expensive (crappy) third party raw processor which would 'ameliorate' the issue.

I don't regret that purchase mind you - owning that camera really accelerated my return to film and negative scanning, which I consider a blessing. I dumped everything on ebay and never looked back. It is incredible how I get way more pleasant fine picture detail from a Kodak 200 iso negative exposed with my crappy £150 Yashica T5 and scanned in house than I used to get with those crappy 2010s £1000 Fujifilm X-trans based camera kits.

 

[Raymond Lin]

I mean 'crappy' (as in poorly designed/poor value/etc) consumer electronics items have existed for many years and I think will keep existing.

One example just to stay in the photography field. How about those crappy first generation Fuji X-trans sensor-based mirrorless cameras? Thousands and thousands of £ for what exactly - for an inferior sensor that's essentially incapable of properly rendering detail even via its own in-camera jpgs. Used to fall one for one of these crappy products some years ago. A Fujifilm XT-10 with a tiny (and objectively nicely made) 27mm Fujifilm pancake.

Well - the rendering of complex detail in the crappy X-trans sensor in that camera was spectacularly bad: trees, bushes, leaves, rocks: they all had a 'wormy/swirly' look, the problem was so well known that articles were written about the so called 'Painterly effect'. Incredible that a major company would release such a flawed sensor. And the Fuji fanboys in denial would tell you to just shoot raw and then purchase some other expensive (crappy) third party raw processor which would 'ameliorate' the issue.

I don't regret that purchase mind you - owning that camera really accelerated my return to film and negative scanning, which I consider a blessing. I dumped everything on ebay and never looked back. It is incredible how I get way more pleasant fine picture detail from a Kodak 200 iso negative exposed with my crappy £150 Yashica T5 and scanned in house than I used to get with those crappy 2010s £1000 Fujifilm X-trans based camera kits.

You mean this crappy X-Trans Sensor camera that i have?

No, i don't know what you mean...

 

[trypdal]

You mean this X-Trans Sensor camera that i have?

Not sure. Mine was I believe a crop size sensor, it was in a faux SLR form factor camera called if I remember correctly XT-10 or something. Yours looks like a rangefinder. Either way, I was so disappointed. Even the Sony-made Bayer sensor in my humble Nikon D3200 was vastly better than the Xtrans in my camera. Pity the D3200 was problematic in other ways.

 

[Raymond Lin]

Not sure. Mine was I believe a crop size sensor, it was in a faux SLR form factor camera called if I remember correctly XT-10 or something. Yours looks like a rangefinder. Either way, I was so disappointed. Even the Sony-made Bayer sensor in my humble Nikon D3200 was vastly better than the Xtrans in my camera. Pity the D3200 was problematic in other ways.

It was a rhetorical question with sacasm, the X-Pro 1 is the 1st gen X-trans sensor, XT10 is actually 2nd gen and got "better", along with the X-T1, which i also have.

And the XT1 is still a fine sensor and camera.

 

[tikkathreebarrel]

It was a rhetorical question with sacasm, the X-Pro 1 is the 1st gen X-trans sensor, XT10 is actually 2nd gen and got "better", along with the X-T1, which i also have.

And the XT1 is still a fine sensor and camera.

Gosh! Aren't they just reaally, reaally bad photos? Talk about Brand X....

I simply ape your hint of self deprecation and sarcasm: actually I'm going over to EBay right now!