pricing used cameras?

[topaz]

A relative has written to me with a question: how do you figure out a fair price for a used DSLR?  She's looking at a Nikon D80 up on Craigslist and not sure whether the $475 being asked for the camera body is reasonable.

The thing is that I'm not actually sure whether there are special issues around pricing used cameras that don't apply to other electronic equipment.  My usual M.O. for figuring this out would be to go search for Nikon D80 bodies on ebay, Craigslist, etc. to get an idea of what the ballpark price should be, but I don't know if that's a good approach here.

How would you solve this problem?  And if you had an opportunity to try the camera out, is there anything specific you'd try to do to make sure it's in good working condition?

Comments

[ctseawa.livejournal.com]

I can't answer your entire question but one thing you want to check is how much the shutter has been used. A warn shutter is a huge pain to replace and is the reason I know of why a lot of cameras go up for sale instead - it's a good excuse to upgrade. :)

If it has taken more than 40K pictures it probably isn't in good shape anymore but you might want to check the manf. specs for that body and see what they say is a good shutter lifetime.

[coraline]

yeah, i usually check completed auctions on ebay for the current market rate.

[mangosteen]

Seconded.

Not reasonable

[mr-privacy.livejournal.com]

I don't know what a D40 is relative to Nikon's line, but it seem amazon has them new for $469. I'd look to see what B&H lists them for, too.

I do know that Canon has recently massively upgraded their line, and would be pretty hesitant to buy a used body for more than a few hundred $ unless money was really tight. The nifty on the new bodies is pretty extreme (blink detect, hd video, massive autofocus improvements).

Seconding what ctseawa says, you want to run exiftool -ShutterCount on a recent image to get the shutter actuation count. see http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/TagNames/Nikon.html

Re: Not reasonable

[mr-privacy.livejournal.com]

Wait, sorry, you said 80, not 40. That may be a lot more reasonable.

Re: Not reasonable

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

That page is interesting but not illuminating. It is not clear to me that "exiftool -ShutterCount" will actually yield any useful information, and I am not sure I would be able to walk this person through the process of collecting that information. I would love to know an idiotproof method of collecting the number of shutter releases on a used Nikon.

Re: Not reasonable

[mr-privacy.livejournal.com]

Since I suggested it, mail me a recent photo and I'll poke for you.

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

First, ask where it's been and try to see if the owner has been to Burning Man. :) Then, take a picture at a very fast shutter speed and then a very slow one, and at a very wide aperture and a very narrow one. Do this in RAW mode. Then, use your favorite EXIF browser to look at the wide/narrow jpegs for artifacts... and to see how many shutter actuations there have been. :) Here's (http://www.flickr.com/photos/kyterryls/1443513047/meta/) an example of the exif data out of the camera on a D80 -- this one has had 16696 shutter actuations. You can really take quite a lot of pictures before there's expected degradation there; I'd check the manufacturer's recommendations for how many they figure the camera can tolerate under normal use.

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

If I shoot RAW and export to JPEG in iPhoto, should I expect the system to preserve fields like the shutter actuation count in the resulting JPEG? I can't find the shutter count in photos of my own I've exported to JPEG this way, but don't know if that's just because iPhoto and Preview don't care to show me those fields.

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure whether that preserves it or not. My expectation is that it depends wildly on what programs you use for conversion, and that some are very likely to drop uninteresting and irrelevant fields like number of shutter actuations. But I do know that if you upload an unmodified jpg right to flickr you can see it.

Oh! Dude! I see your confusion! I wrote "RAW mode" when I meant "JPG mode"! Nevermind, please pretend I said what was in my head. :)

removing data

[mr-privacy.livejournal.com]

Apple does remove data when converting RAW to jpg in Aperture, I'd guess that they also do it in iphoto. /Applications/ImageCapture may help you get the RAWs.

Re: removing data

[fengshui.livejournal.com]

That's weird. Neither Lightroom or the Canon software strip EXIF data, as far as I know.

Your best bet is to get your hand on it and take a bunch of pictures in JPG mode (ideally with the variance that Molly recommends), then look at them in Irfanview (or some other program that can read all of the EXIF data) and see how they look. I'd also try to test the autofocus system to make sure that it's stable and that it works all-right in low-light.