Nikon J2 Price
Leroy Turcios
I've just bought a 1972 Photomic with 50mm f2 lens and erc. Apart from a couple of rubs on the head, it is in very nice condition, and seems to be 'low mileage'. So far as I can tell, everything works. I hope to put a film through in the next day or two.
Back in 1972, I was a kid growing up in Hong Kong. I recall that a Photomic F2 body was like HK$2000 or so. Keep in mind that camera prices were considerably lower in Hong Kong at that time so that a lot of European and American visitors would buy cameras and watches there. Another factor is that the foreign exchange rate has changed drastically since then. I would say it translates to approximately US$400 to 500 or so as a ballpark figure.
Remember, back then some dealers would charge extra for batteries, straps, body & lens caps that came with the camera so the listed price may not be the actul street price. But it will give you an idea of about what they sold for.
500 US bucks, body only, sounds about right. I seem to remember that the UK price was somewhere North of 300 and out of my league back then. I now own three of them. The last one cost me something like 50, 3 or 4 years ago. It works perfectly but is missing the bottom cap for the motor-drive hole.
I indeed recall that back then, "street price" what people actually paid was considerably lower than the manufacturer suggested retail price (list price). Not sure that it was as much as 40%, but 20% off list price seems common.
I had been looking for one with the plain prism, but good ones seem few and far between and more money. Then, yesterday, I found a plain prism, described as exc++ for 75. It arrived this morning and I think it a bit better than that. Seems remarkable to pay 98 for a complete cameras, and that much for just the prism, but I'm happy.
Sorry to tell you this Mervyn, but my 50 quid F2 came complete with a plain prism. I actually prefer the look of the camera with the flattened out Photomic prism. After all you can just take the battery out and ignore the needle. But you still get the advantage of the Judas window that shows you the aperture through the viewfinder - well, just, and if you squint at it.
FWIW, you could certainly get a good secondhand car for the price of an F2 when it first came out. And it would have easily put the 10% deposit down on a fairly nice townhouse. So Nikon's weren't much of an investment really. If I sold all my film Nikons today, I might be able to pay the bill for a meal out for myself and 3 or 4 friends - at a modest restaurant.
All: Don't forget that there was a major burst of inflation, at least in the US, between 1972 and 1980. I don't remember the exact start and end dates, but I'm pretty sure it's between those limits. That means that a 1975 price would be a lot higher than the equivalent (inflation adjusted) price in 1972.
Last summer I bought a near mint condition Nikon F3/T and quickly added three classic lenses (28 f2 /50 f1.2 /105mm f2.5.) Camera is vintage 1983. These are truly great cameras and a lot of fun to use. There is no way I would have bought it in 1985 when I started photography. Classic cameras are an addiction all their own!
David Harris suggested I look for a contemporary copy of Amateur Photographer. Two years ago, I actually threw-away around 200 copies of AP and the like, some going back to the 1950s. Not even the charity shops would take them, and they went to waste disposal.
However, what David said reminded me that I have a compendium book of AP Nikon test reports, and sure enough there is a report undertaken in May 1972. The price, including f2 lens, was 334. It is possible that dealers might be selling for less, but discounts were not very common at that time for this sort of equipment.
You are correct Sam if the person was buying the body only. If ther included one or two nice lenses it could be brought up higher. Intro price was $2000 UK pounds and here is a link to an article at that time that quotes that price. FYI and hope this helps.
By the time I was shopping, the D3 was about 2650. The D3 was about 3000 not long before (unsurprisingly, the D700 hurt the retail value). According to DPReview the launch price of the D3 was 3400, the D3s was 4200 and the D3x was 5500. It's hard to imagine spending 5000 on a D700 unless they really wanted to beat the rush and got fleeced by someone buying them early and reselling on eBay. If they're including the price of a 24-70 and 14-24 or 70-200 bundled with it (when Nikon weren't shamefully trying to ditch the old 24-120 as a kit lens), I could believe 5000, but not for just the camera.
Well, FX photography is expensive. Allowing for inflation and what happened to sterling compared with other currencies, the D600 is surprisingly cheap, at least during the current price fight with Canon. The D800 really hasn't held its price so well, but I suspect the D600 has something to do with that. The DCS Pro-14n is going for about 300-400 on eBay if you're really after a budget FX camera. The original 5D is surprisingly cheap.
On the other hand, DX cameras are astonishingly cheap for what's in them. Film cameras are (mostly) cheap... getting the film developed, not so much. Lenses, sadly, are getting worse faster than inflation - but at least there's the used market.
Shun: The exchange rate was very nearly $2 to 1 in summer 2008, and crashed during my visit to the States just after I got my D700. The exchange rate has been bubbling around $1.55-$1.65 for the last few months, although I gather a downward trend is expected in the near future. The UK launch price of the D800 was 2599.99 (according to DPReview), although it's finally under 2000 now, and the D800E was launched somewhere in the 2900-3000 range; this is what I paid (and the cost of having it in time for the Olympics), although I don't recall the exact price because I picked up some other things in the same transaction.
The following month, in October 2008, I went to Mexico with my brand new D700, and there were a couple of British travellers in our group. They were working and living in the US, and we discussed exchange rates, which was about $1.5 to the Pound at that time.
I have a 1962 Amphoto book that has the price list of the time in the back. These are presumably list prices, so the street price should have been a bit lower, but owing to press times, the prices may have been a bit outdated by the time it was printed, so it may have evened out:
Translating into today's dollars is always speculative, but from what I've read the average would be about 5 1/2 to 6 times for most items. Some things, such as cars and real estate, have gone a good deal higher, and of course many technological gadgets have gone spectacularly lower. But a 5.5 multiplier would put a basic F body at about $1200, with the Black Photomic and normal lens nearly double that.
I have had my D80 for 4 years now, and it has been working perfectly. I haven't used it for the past 2 months, and when I took it out last week I found out that it is broken. The LCD flashes "Err" when I try to focus or take a photo. The shutter works OK. Camera does not seem to be able to focus. This happens with two lenses. I did try cleaning the lens contacts, but that did not help. Also tried resetting the camera. At this point I am assuming something is broken.
What is the best place to have this repaired? Send it in to Nikon directly, or use a camera shop authorized to do the repairs? Where will I get the best service? the best price? I read somewhere online that Nikon repairs from them directly can run easily over $200. To me that seems a bit insane, given that that is probably more then half the market cost of my camera as it is right now.
Take it to Nikon. Check their website for a local repair and service centre, if there's nothing nearby you may need to post/courier it. Nikon may make some small fixes free of charge and aren't always as expensive as you fear.
The least convenient option that I can think of is to send everything to Nikon. You can visit their website to supply the necessary information, and they will give you a quote before repair (mine were covered under warranty, perhaps it would be reasonable enough to get done or if not perhaps the price of inspection/postage & insurance would be reasonable enough to give it a try).
JPEGs look good clean through ISO 400, though at ISO 400 I start to see a tiny bit of softening; they're good up to about ISO 1600, and potentially usable up through ISO 6400, but as low as ISO 800 you can get better results from raw files (or play with the noise-reduction settings).
Overall, the D7100's got good dynamic range and tonality, though there isn't a lot of recoverable detail in the highlights. The default Picture Control does shift the hues a bit and increases contrast till it clips a little more than I like, but the neutral style delivers more-accurate colors without looking flat.
Video looks good, without many of the edge artifacts I expected to see and decent resolvability for 1080p, but with the typical blown-out highlights and crushed blacks (on default settings) that you find with this class of camera. The bigger problem for shooting video is the lack of aperture control -- you can control shutter speed and ISO sensitivity only. I'm sure Nikon has a good reason for it, but it's a really big hole in the camera's feature set if you care about video.
The camera powers on and shoots in just under 0.3 second, and typical shot-to-shot time (which in our tests essentially measures shutter lag) runs 0.2 second for either raw or JPEG; that increases to about 0.8 second overall with flash enabled, which is still pretty zippy, but it also varied quite a bit from a low of 0.6 second to a high of 1.9 seconds during testing. Shot lag -- the time needed to focus, expose, and shoot -- runs approximately 0.4 second in bright conditions and 0.5 second in dim. The lens movement is the bottleneck for shot lag, and the 18-105mm kit lens isn't terribly fast in that respect.
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