Sad Used Prices for EM-1 first edition

Tom Caldwell wrote:

jwilliams wrote:

LoneTree1 wrote:

jwilliams wrote:

Probably one of the best buys in m43 right now is lightly used EM1 IIs going for around $800 or so. Fred Miranda is full of them. Probably people just dying to throw $1K to the wind to get the latest model.

I have noticed prices for m43 gear there are in a severe slump and often just never sell even at pretty attractive prices. Seems to be a flood of used m43 gear as people move to larger format systems.

There is a flood of just about everything in the photo world these days. The precipitous decline in the sales from nearly all makers is a good indication of that.

No doubt prices of everything photo related are down. The thing I notice most is a lot of the m43 gear for sale just does not sell at all regardless of price. Almost any FF mirrorless lens or camera put up at a reasonable price sells reasonably quick. Canon or Nikon DSLR lenses don't command great prices, but usually sell quickly as they can be readily adapted to their brands mirrorless offerings. m43 gear just has little to no demand. Wish it wasn't so as I'm going to sell some of my m43 gear.

I see room for all theories - it is just what works.

I could have sold my Canon EF 400/2.8L lens 10 years ago at a huge loss on the buy price when I decided that I was not going to buy any more dslr bodies. For a while it looked like it might eventually become an orphan. But I kept my last 5D dslr body working for many years afterwards - it was still making great images. But then EF mount adapters started appearing - there was an adapting way out of EF mount dslr lock-step. Unfortunately I was not particularly impressed with the A7R series 1. But I gravitated to M4/3 and soon enough and EF lenses worked very well on M4/3 bodies. Welcome to active re-purposing EF mount lenses.

Now with L-Mount I can again re-use my EF mount lenses. My 400/2.8 is probably still worth more or less what it was ten years ago. Therefore we might argue that the cost of keeping it has been nothing - only loss of the earning capacity of the funds tied up.

Or I could have sold it and used it as part payment on a Sony FE equivalent if such a lens had been made. When I fell out of love with Sony - back on the blocks for the FE lens and now I would use the remainder as a deposit on a then non-existent M4/3 lens - there may even have been something close in 4/3? Or I could have waited and plumped for the 300/4.0 from Olympus, but I did buy the 200/2.8 so maybe there was something freudian happening there ....

Now sell my Panasonic 200/2.8 at a loss and buy something for L-Mount? Hardly.

Chasing nirvana, or better yet perfection.

As you know I'm an engineer and have managed to go over 3 decades never working for anyone other than myself. One thing really allowed this feat to be possible - I am a perfectionist. It's in my DNA. The products I produced for others were always striving to perfection or nirvana if you prefer. I've never been one to just stop at good enough. That is why companies hired me and paid me much more money than the engineers they already had on staff that could probably have completed the necessary tasks at some rudimentary level.

Every product I look at in everyday life I see room for improvement, sometime LOTS of improvement. Cameras unfortunately are no different.

In terms of cameras I really place a huge amount of importance in how they handle and how I as a human interface with them. For me technical aspects of the photo really aren't as big a deal except I do very much like the leeway of having a fair amount of cropping capability so I can change and alter the view of the photo later. I do not always get it right the first time. Never knew a mortal human that could.

Here is what may seem like a little thing on my new R, that for me, makes this camera stand out above anything on the market. There is a button, easily accessible at the front of the grip, labeled 'M-fn'. What does this button do? - anything you want. Now many camera have customizable buttons. What is unique about this one is it can perform many different functions without needing to go into a menu and reprogram it. You can assign up to a total of 5 different functions to it (don't see the need for this artificial limit really). By rotating the rear dial you can rotate thru these 5 different functions and the front dial changes the currently selected function. I use this one button and 2 dials to do everything I need. Simple and effective. To me this is a superb example of good engineering. I hope they give the person who thought of this rather simple idea a huge raise, but Canon please do not promote him/her. I want him/her designing cameras.

Most camera makers would place 5 different buttons at different locations, most hard to access, to accomplish the same tasks. They would have some default function with a little image near them to indicate the default function leaving the user no idea what they did after they changed that default function. YUCK. This is horrid engineering in my book and for whatever reason rampant on most current cameras.

Also this camera fits my hands better than any camera I have ever held. That and a superb EVF implementation just make using the camera joy. It weighs one ounce more than my G9 and is actually a bit smaller. Also built very solid. To me these things are hallmarks of good engineering even if on a spec sheet the camera comes up short of some of its competitors.

Is this camera nirvana?  No.  It is a first gen product so it inevitably has some warts, but in reality for a first gen product the warts are tiny and do not get in the way of my photography.

Maybe that new R5 will be nirvana?