Old film cameras as collectibles

[Niner]

After buying that old Afga dinosaur box camera, I got to thinking about film cameras as a possible long term investment as a collectible. You know how old Enfields, and M1 carbines could be bought plenty cheap forty and more years ago. Nobody wanted them and there was a glut on the market. Many old guns were still pretty cheap up until a dozen years ago and they started going up in price. Remember the four for a $100 Turk Mausers? I didn't buy any....just got the "select" quality ones for $49 each ...including shipping. But....I am drifting off course.

I got to watching what old film cameras of all kinds were going for on eBay. It is not difficult to find cameras with multiple lenses and cases and other stuff thrown in going for less than $50.... that cost over $1000 thirty or so years ago when they were new. Now, of course, the demand now days is for good digital cameras. Nobody, who just wants to take photos, wants a film camera. No film to buy. No Prints to pay for. No slide film left and no slide projectors being made either. The value of the film camera has fallen to the point of being curiosities to be put on a shelf and wondered at.

But... what if .... some young people, some years from now, take up old fashion photography the same as we took up shooting bp rifles? Or we took up shooting old military gun that nobody but a select few even wanted?

While I was day dreaming about this I looked on the eBay this morning and put in a bid on a Pentax late 90's PZ70 SLR with a 38-50 an a 100-300 lense, cases for the lenses and a camera case, the instruction manual, and ...... four rolls of film that may or may not be out of date. I won for less than $23 plus another $12 UPS shipping charge.

The PZ 70 was no really great , nor professional, camera....but back in the late 90's it sold for over $500, not counting the zoom lenses.

Oh well....I'll probably be dead before the camera gets to be worth much more than I paid for it. But.... I don't really care. You got to buy low....really low in this case....in order to have a chance to sell high sometime in the future. And...unlike Kodak...an actual camera and lenses can't go bankrupt on you.

[Niner Delta]

We buy old guns and shoot them because there was a huge amount of ammo that was sealed up
and will hardly ever go bad. I'm not so sure about the film supply.

.

[Niner]

Yeah, Vern. That's right. And the ammo used to be as cheap as the guns. I posted about my supply of Turk 8mm that I still have some of. And the 7.62x54r Nagant ammo, cheaper than it is now, and bought by the spam can....complete with a big can opener to open it with still fills a few ammo cans. But the surplus ammo market is tightening and the prices are escalating. You would have a hard time finding some calibers that used to be cheap and plentiful.

I think film will continue to be produced for a while in greater and lessor amounts. The developing options will become more pricey I'd imagine. However, in the BP world, percussion caps and already cast ball ammo, and Black Powder and substitutes for black powder continue to be made for continuing generations discovering the magic of the old guns . So are reproduction BP firearms. The Italians and Spanish seemed to have made a good living out of them.

I've thought about getting my old dark room stuff out of the garage. It doesn't take much to develop a roll of B&W film.... if the developer chemicals and stop bath can be found. B&W film can be bought online.

[Dave 101]

I have been sorting through my late Fathers photographic cameras and equipment and seeing if there is any demand for it , basically I have one box of junk destined for the dump .

Dave

[Niner]

Take an inventory first Dave. Some names, like Leica, still demand some money just out of name value I guess. Not everything goes very cheap. There are collectors looking for certain brands and models which can drive price up to nearly what they cost new.

[Reese Williams]

There is no money in old cameras. Thirty years ago I had a pretty large collection of antique cameras, Kodak Autographics, a large format Graphflex, and bunches of other stuff. Like a lot of other collectibles the antique store prices were stupid high but good deals could be found in the wild. The ex got all the cameras when we split and I haven't missed them. Adjusting for inflation the prices have stayed virtually flat for the last 30 years. Anyway, that's my personal view on old cameras. Collect them because they are neat mechanical objects, are fun to use, can still take some outstanding pictures but not as an investment.

[Niner]

Kodak Automatics are on eBay all the time. They had a feature where you could take a "pencil" and write information about a photograph through the paper back gotten to by a slot in the camera case and the information would end up in the border of the subsequent print. I think I remember somebody having one of those when I was a kid....maybe my grandmother.

The prices back in the teens of the 20th Century seem to have been, mostly in the $25 to $50 range. The highest price one I could find was made in the early 1920's and had a range finder and some other features and could be bought for around $100. Now days you can still buy one for $25 to $50 with a nice one maybe bringing as much as $100. However........$25 in 1920 was worth about $300 in today's money. But....that's only one way to measure value.

[DuncaninFrance]

I just up dated the display of my old cameras that I have in the Gîte and so I took a photo for the record

[Niner]

I had my old film cameras on a shelf in my stuff collecting room. I decided I needed a way to cover the front so that they wouldn't get dusty. I came to the conclusion rather than make a frame and buy some glass it was cheaper to buy an already made frame even though the narrow way was too large for the space. Just took a couple of hinges and put it up. The "glass" is really Plexiglas.

I've thought about getting one of those medium format cameras like your Yashika. But...strangely enough these 120/620 cameras are holding a little value still. $100 is the bottom of the selling range for the most part. My Kodak Hawk-Eye Model B is a 120 film camera and I've been seeing if it will take any photos or not. Haven't finished the first roll of film yet. I've got what I need to develop the roll though.

[Niner]

I bought a Canon EOS II E the other day. It does a lot of stuff at the top end for camera guys of once upon a time vintage. More than I could easily afford before film went the way of the eight track tape. I took it out for a run today. I have to wait until the color film is developed.... another thing that says film cameras have been surpassed further than the eight track tape. But... film photography has a certain soul that modern photography doesn't have. Film has to be developed and prints have to be made. Digital has no soul to it. There is no sensed value to each image in digital photography... no click has any real worth in itself. The decisive moment no longer exists. To focus on a subject and consider the mechanics and the options in film photography is about like the difference between shooting black powder and loading a round of smokeless powder into a modern semiautomatic firearm.

I paid about $25 for it. The lens in the photo is my own. I just bought the body. My next step is to go to black and white and develop the negatives and scan them for potential prints. But...that's yet to come.

See if you can digest all of this crapola somebody said about about this camera it when it meant something.

http://photo.net/equipment/canon/canon-elanII