So I may as wel start another round of the deals, the worst deals.
Mine was an Ebay purchase of Tri Color Meter for $140 dollars to find out that it's not working, I replaced the battery for $65!!! dollars, then I sent it to manufacturer to find out they couldn't fix it and charged me another $200 for trying.
Ended up in a garbage.
An 8x10 Korona that i bought of of ebay for $275. Looked great in the pictures the owner said it was in very good condition.
It just needed some cleaning and some minor wood repair. Ha! By minor he meant some dry rot.
Said the bellows were light tight, my a$$! The hardware is loose and the gears sound stripped.
The camera wasn't worth the shipping price. Its still in my front hall waiting for me to do something with it.
Ive been thinking of tuning it into a wet plate camera since its already a junker.
Another one is when i bought a lot of Ilford paper from a local media converter.
It was from the ilford shutdown a few years back. They looked good and the price was ok.
I developed a few and id say half of what i bought was fogged. I think they shipped it over in an hot container instead of a refrigerated one.
Just another thing to add to the storage room.
I bought a DeGolden Busch 8x10 for $200 in good condition. And it was. It was still the worst camera design in the world, it was truly bizarre, all nautical brass and oak.
On eBay I bought an excellent Graflex Super D except to find out the shutter was broken. But it looked excellent.
And a Photoflex Changing Room that turned out to be all mildewed... but the seller said it usable. It was, if you could stand it.
I bought a brand new lens once, my very first LF lens. Only once.
I'd have to think about this. Off the top of my head, I think I have had more cases of simple buyer's remorse, than, "ouch, that was a bad deal!" Mainly it would be down to things I spent a little too much for, things I bought that I didn't need, or the worst, a combination of both.
So far, my record's been pretty good, but I think I've been slipping a bit lately. It's gotten a little harder to justify the GAS.
Two whole plate film holders billed as rough but serviceable for $165. Didn't check them out until some time after the purchase, turned out that they leak light like a sieve. Ouch!
Roger
The Agfa Ansco 5x7 camera I bought from The F Stops Here, a LF specialty store that I don't think is still in business. I paid a premium price for what was supposed to be a premium camera. However, the seller neglected to mention that a former owner began painting it black and quit half way through, so it was part gray and part sloppy black. The painter also didn't bother to remove or even paint around the metal pieces, he just painted right over them. I'm sure others have made worse deals, at least the camera worked, but it was disappointing to get such an ugly camera after paying top dollar. Particularly when the crappy black paint job couldn't have been more obvious, so that the seller's failure to mention it was clearly intentional.
My other deal with the same seller around the same time was also a bad one - a lens on which the shutter stuck open at slow speeds. When I called the seller I got Chuck Farmer on the phone, who was working there at the time. He was very nonchalant about it, no apology for not even bothering to check the shutter before they sold it, no excuses, just acted like it was completely normal to sell a lens with a non-functioning shutter. It took some months but I eventually got a refund after several emails and phone calls. That was the last time I dealt with The F Stops Here.
Brian Ellis
Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you do criticize them you'll be
a mile away and you'll have their shoes.
Loaning a (ex)friend my brand new 4x5 camera and lenses, along with my 8x10 B&J and several lenses, tripods, holders, the whole 9 yards for a "project" he had started.
That was 11 years ago, wanna guess how much of my equipment I ever got back???
(it took me several years to recover financially enough to be able to start repurchasing what I had "loaned out")
Around £150 for a Russian made 21mm viewfinder, to replace the squinty OEM one on the Hasselblad SWC. Turns out not only was I stung bad, but I can't look through it cos my cheekbone hits on the A12 back...
Erie, sounds like the 'friend' who asked me to move in to his spare 'double' room at £450 a month... one night, no bed, only space for a tiny single, and £1000 later I was back home, minus all the belongings I'd taken up with me
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