What's the truth about the Panasonic 14-140II?

Someone else mentioned it'd be worth waiting for a good sale regardless of anything else, well, the 14-140 f3.5-5.6 is on a quasi sale right now... It doesn't seem to be any sort of Panasonic promo (B&H, Adorama, etc still have it at list price), BUT, Amazon and Gearshop (same thing but free 2-day shipping) have dropped the price to $563.77 in reaction to a third party merchant on Amazon selling it at $550 or so. It's pretty common for Amazon's price matching algorithm to do this...

What isn't quite so common is for third party merchants to drop the price of this lens quite so low, however, this very same merchant (Eagle Camera) actually dropped the price of this very same lens all the way to $450-ish once before. The lowest Amazon lowered their own price at the time was like $575 tho, so the current price is the lowest yet if you wanna buy it direct from Amazon. You'd think it'd make more sense just to buy it from the 3rd party merchant BUT, some Google-Fu reveals some shadyness...

If you look around, you'll find out Eagle Camera has actually sold grey market lenses on Amazon before without explicitly stating so, specially when the price is too good to be true. It's not a big deal if you're just looking for a good deal, but if you ever have to deal with warranty issues you may get turned down by Panasonic USA.

Amazon wouldn't do this of course, so if you wanna be safe it's better to buy it directly from them. Anyway, the new 14-140 has only been out a year so there isn't much price history to look at, but if you look at the price history of the old 14-140 f4.0-5.6 you'll notice it's price never dropped more than $50-100 thru the holidays, and sometimes not at all.

TL;DR: It's pretty cheap on Amazon and Gearshop right now, might be a good time to jump on it. I think as I wrote this the price actually dropped another $23, heh, I had just placed an order too... Gonna have to call and ask for a price adjustment. It's $90-off right now!