Waiting for my 65mm & 90mm Travelwides~
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Waiting for my 65mm & 90mm Travelwides~
In a Utube world where fourteen year old become multi-millionaires writing some software game or creating some robotic device to help the world, (or not), it's easy to become frustrated from lack of success. Ben and Justin are building us, (at our request) a dinosaur with modern DNA. In a world of high quality digital cameras and phones with 16X pixels that are made in the multi-millions we are very lucky to find two bright guys foolish enough to take on this project for no profit. It's a toy and we're like a bunch of guys crying in our beer. If this camera were available in Costco or Walmart nobody would buy it! Just us!
What we need to do, IMHO, is to find more ways to gain a bigger audience for large format B&W, color too I guess, so what we do doesn't go the way of the dinosauses as much else has. One way is to get more local galleries to have shows featuring large format work. I am a sponsor to one, The Art Intersection (.com) in Gilbert, AZ. Check it out on the web, they often accept the of guest artist.
Happy trails,
SteveP
KS seems to be safest with some big players like Lomography, essentially letting them know beforehand how many units of a new product to contract for and as a bonus they get to charge the customers weeks before the item is even made. It lets them introduce a new product with little risk that they will be stuck with unsold inventory.
For little guys who just have a good idea and want to share it, like Ben and Justin, lack of experience with the real world manufacturing of only seemingly simple products has proven to be a minefield. Kudos to both of these lads for sticking this out, especially at a real drain on their their personal finances.
When the KS production run is complete and the cameras distributed to the prepaid buyers . . .will cameras be available at retail?
Having missed the KS funded run, will I be able to order a camera from WanderLust?
Drew,
Ben said that there might be a few cameras available from the first run of parts. Be sure to sign up for the newsletter on their website to find out.
I have no idea if and when they're going to do another run.
I'm sure they would like to do a second production run after all backer and pre-order sales from April/2014 are shipped. I asked Ben how many cameras have to be run to get a reasonable cost per unit and he said a minimum of 500 units. I would be surprised if he would order a second batch without firm preorders with at least a 50% deposit on each customer order. Remember these cameras are $150 each, not the $100 each paid by Kickstarter backers.
Sure . . .a Pre-order and deposit at a "retail" price. I was just interested to know if that was in the works, but thinking it through , its probably still too early for them to plan for that.
I thought I had signed up for the newsletter. I'll have to try that again.
One alternative could be that they communicate like crazy, with daily updates and can never get a camera built.... but I think we will get our camera's. Frankly I don't need the updates, but I want the camera's I backed. Just not willing to whine about it while I have so much other equipment to use.
Frankly, I consider 110 pages of posts just on this site alone as TMI.:cool: