Second-hand Fujifilm shortage on ebay & prices going up?

My X100S is dying and I was looking to get another second-hand Fujifilm from ebay (UK) and I noticed that there don't seem to be many X100 series listed on ebay as previously and prices are up. For example the X100S seems to be around £450. When I bought mine 5 years ago, they were £350-£400. XE-3 are around £380-£450. They were around £300 a year ago.

Are others seeing this?

Maybe it's inflation, fall in the pound or component shortages stopping people buying new cameras? Or maybe people have stopped buying new cameras all together?

What's going on?

Tak K said:

My X100S is dying and I was looking to get another second-hand Fujifilm from ebay (UK) and I noticed that there don't seem to be many X100 series listed on ebay as previously and prices are up. For example the X100S seems to be around £450. When I bought mine 5 years ago, they were £350-£400. XE-3 are around £380-£450. They were around £300 a year ago.

Are others seeing this?

Maybe it's inflation, fall in the pound or component shortages stopping people buying new cameras? Or maybe people have stopped buying new cameras all together?

What's going on?

Click to expand...

Or Fujifilm taking wrong turns, and hence current users not being keen to upgrade? That is the case for me, since X-H1. Sorry, but I can't say it often enough.

Dan

Tak K said:

My X100S is dying and I was looking to get another second-hand Fujifilm from ebay (UK) and I noticed that there don't seem to be many X100 series listed on ebay as previously and prices are up. For example the X100S seems to be around £450. When I bought mine 5 years ago, they were £350-£400. XE-3 are around £380-£450. They were around £300 a year ago.

Are others seeing this?

Maybe it's inflation, fall in the pound or component shortages stopping people buying new cameras? Or maybe people have stopped buying new cameras all together?

What's going on?

Click to expand...

MPB has an X100v and multiple other variants on the UK site. Look there maybe

Tak K said:

My X100S is dying and I was looking to get another second-hand Fujifilm from ebay (UK) and I noticed that there don't seem to be many X100 series listed on ebay as previously and prices are up. For example the X100S seems to be around £450. When I bought mine 5 years ago, they were £350-£400. XE-3 are around £380-£450. They were around £300 a year ago.

Are others seeing this?

Maybe it's inflation, fall in the pound or component shortages stopping people buying new cameras? Or maybe people have stopped buying new cameras all together?

What's going on?

Click to expand...

Supply and demand. Not inflation.

eBay is now dominated by commercial sellers, for private sellers there are high fees and other inconveniences.

Much easier and less hassle to sell ones gear to MPB and other used camera shops.

Another reason is that prices for new camera models keep increasing .. and often older gear can do the job just as well... So more demand for the golden oldies.

allineedislight said:

eBay is now dominated by commercial sellers, for private sellers there are high fees and other inconveniences.

Much easier and less hassle to sell ones gear to MPB and other used camera shops.

Click to expand...

This. MPB is LOADED with used Fuji gear (as long as you don't want silver). Amazon also has the most "open box" Fuji lenses available that I've ever seen. Ebay is kind of a mess and I think the Japanese sellers listing used X-T2s for $1400 and such isn't helping pricing.

DanFry said:

Tak K said:

My X100S is dying and I was looking to get another second-hand Fujifilm from ebay (UK) and I noticed that there don't seem to be many X100 series listed on ebay as previously and prices are up. For example the X100S seems to be around £450. When I bought mine 5 years ago, they were £350-£400. XE-3 are around £380-£450. They were around £300 a year ago.

Are others seeing this?

Maybe it's inflation, fall in the pound or component shortages stopping people buying new cameras? Or maybe people have stopped buying new cameras all together?

What's going on?

Click to expand...

Or Fujifilm taking wrong turns, and hence current users not being keen to upgrade? That is the case for me, since X-H1. Sorry, but I can't say it often enough.

Dan

Click to expand...

Agreed. Yes, I've shot the X-H2S and I wound up not hating the PASM controls. It's a great camera.. but other than faster autofocus, generally, I just frankly can't see the need to upgrade from my pair of X-H1s. They made the H1 too well :-D and now they've vowed to not make that mistake again.. hence the new PASM video cameras, technical marvels though they are.

DanFry said:

Tak K said:

My X100S is dying and I was looking to get another second-hand Fujifilm from ebay (UK) and I noticed that there don't seem to be many X100 series listed on ebay as previously and prices are up. For example the X100S seems to be around £450. When I bought mine 5 years ago, they were £350-£400. XE-3 are around £380-£450. They were around £300 a year ago.

Are others seeing this?

Maybe it's inflation, fall in the pound or component shortages stopping people buying new cameras? Or maybe people have stopped buying new cameras all together?

What's going on?

Click to expand...

Or Fujifilm taking wrong turns, and hence current users not being keen to upgrade? That is the case for me, since X-H1. Sorry, but I can't say it often enough.

Dan

Click to expand...

Irrelevant as this is about eBay mostly. Repeating a silly statement does not make it smart

robert1955 said:

DanFry said:

Tak K said:

My X100S is dying and I was looking to get another second-hand Fujifilm from ebay (UK) and I noticed that there don't seem to be many X100 series listed on ebay as previously and prices are up. For example the X100S seems to be around £450. When I bought mine 5 years ago, they were £350-£400. XE-3 are around £380-£450. They were around £300 a year ago.

Are others seeing this?

Maybe it's inflation, fall in the pound or component shortages stopping people buying new cameras? Or maybe people have stopped buying new cameras all together?

What's going on?

Click to expand...

Or Fujifilm taking wrong turns, and hence current users not being keen to upgrade? That is the case for me, since X-H1. Sorry, but I can't say it often enough.

Dan

Click to expand...

Irrelevant as this is about eBay mostly. Repeating a silly statement does not make it smart

Click to expand...

eBay isn't the only place to buy a camera. That said, I've seen used X100Vs going for hundreds of USD over list price, so for whatever reason, there does seem to be something of a run on these cameras recently.

Tak K said:

Are others seeing this?

Click to expand...

I’ve been buying and selling a lot over the past 18 months and yes, prices have gone up a bit. All the X100 models seem to often fetch around £100 more than they did a year ago, but that’s certainly not always the case. In the last week or so I’ve seen at least two original X100s go for just over £200. My belief is that the shortage of new X100Vs has buoyed used prices and that’s trickled down through the older versions. But, to be fair, other X System models have been attracting higher prices too.

But you do have to bear a few things in mind with eBay. Firstly, asking prices aren’t selling prices: lots of people aim for crazy money and fail to sell. Secondly, you can absolutely still get a bargain if you’re canny—but you have to put the effort in. But thirdly, despite what you might expect, eBay isn’t the cheapest place to buy and never was. I rarely buy from eBay but I always sell there…

Just keep plugging away; if you’re prepared to spend time watching then you’ll find what you want at a good price.

Thanks for the tip about MPB. Seems to also reflect the market price on eBay...

robert1955 said:

DanFry said:

Tak K said:

My X100S is dying and I was looking to get another second-hand Fujifilm from ebay (UK) and I noticed that there don't seem to be many X100 series listed on ebay as previously and prices are up. For example the X100S seems to be around £450. When I bought mine 5 years ago, they were £350-£400. XE-3 are around £380-£450. They were around £300 a year ago.

Are others seeing this?

Maybe it's inflation, fall in the pound or component shortages stopping people buying new cameras? Or maybe people have stopped buying new cameras all together?

What's going on?

Click to expand...

Or Fujifilm taking wrong turns, and hence current users not being keen to upgrade? That is the case for me, since X-H1. Sorry, but I can't say it often enough.

Dan

Click to expand...

Irrelevant as this is about eBay mostly. Repeating a silly statement does not make it smart

Click to expand...

Hard to follow my reasoning, isn't it Robert ;-)

Dan

DanFry said:

robert1955 said:

DanFry said:

Or Fujifilm taking wrong turns, and hence current users not being keen to upgrade? That is the case for me, since X-H1. Sorry, but I can't say it often enough.

Dan

Click to expand...

Irrelevant as this is about eBay mostly. Repeating a silly statement does not make it smart

Click to expand...

Hard to follow my reasoning, isn't it Robert ;-)

Click to expand...

Well, given that the prices of older X100 models didn’t rise until more than two years after the X100V was released, if your reasoning were to be true it would rather imply that Fujifilm users are pretty slow to figure things out

DanFry said:

robert1955 said:

DanFry said:

Tak K said:

My X100S is dying and I was looking to get another second-hand Fujifilm from ebay (UK) and I noticed that there don't seem to be many X100 series listed on ebay as previously and prices are up. For example the X100S seems to be around £450. When I bought mine 5 years ago, they were £350-£400. XE-3 are around £380-£450. They were around £300 a year ago.

Are others seeing this?

Maybe it's inflation, fall in the pound or component shortages stopping people buying new cameras? Or maybe people have stopped buying new cameras all together?

What's going on?

Click to expand...

Or Fujifilm taking wrong turns, and hence current users not being keen to upgrade? That is the case for me, since X-H1. Sorry, but I can't say it often enough.

Dan

Click to expand...

Irrelevant as this is about eBay mostly. Repeating a silly statement does not make it smart

Click to expand...

Hard to follow my reasoning, isn't it Robert ;-)

Dan

Click to expand...

There is none

Jeff Biscuits said:

I’ve been buying and selling a lot over the past 18 months and yes, prices have gone up a bit. All the X100 models seem to often fetch around £100 more than they did a year ago, but that’s certainly not always the case. In the last week or so I’ve seen at least two original X100s go for just over £200. My belief is that the shortage of new X100Vs has buoyed used prices and that’s trickled down through the older versions. But, to be fair, other X System models have been attracting higher prices too.

But you do have to bear a few things in mind with eBay. Firstly, asking prices aren’t selling prices: lots of people aim for crazy money and fail to sell. Secondly, you can absolutely still get a bargain if you’re canny—but you have to put the effort in. But thirdly, despite what you might expect, eBay isn’t the cheapest place to buy and never was. I rarely buy from eBay but I always sell there…

Just keep plugging away; if you’re prepared to spend time watching then you’ll find what you want at a good price.

Click to expand...

Thanks. My perception is that there used to be a lot of private seller auctions of Fujifilm cameras on eBay. Now, it's full of "Buy it now" at very high prices. So maybe, as you say, I just need to keep looking for a good find...

Thanks all

Interesting... To summarise the theories:

• Shortage of supply of second-hand Fujifilm cameras? Not enough people selling cameras?
  • Fujifilm users not upgrading so second-hand cameras are not coming on the market. (I wonder what the status for other camera brands are?)
  • Prices of new cameras keep going up so people are sticking to their old ones.
  • Shortage of X100V pushing up prices of older X100-series. (But other Fujifilm cameras have also gone up in price in the past year).
• Supply and demand - I'm guessing there's no reason to suspect that demand's changed much so it's just tighter supply?
• eBay crowded out by commercial sellers and fewer private sellers on eBay these days. Pricing on eBay distorted by Japanese listings. Look for second-hand cameras elsewhere.

I do hope this is just a phase and there will be plentiful supply of reasonably-priced second-hand cameras in the future. In the meantime, I'm going to try to fix my X100S and keep it going until that time. Hopefully it just needs a $10 replacement LCD screen and nothing more serious.

Yep I definitely noticed the same thing lately.
I decided to try an X-E1 a couple of months ago and was surprised to see them sitting around the £200 mark - this was on most of the used gear sites here in the UK - including eBay.
I ended up getting one for £165 but I had to really do my homework and pretty much had alerts set up on all the sites that I could.

During my purchasing process I watched and read quite a few reviews and a lot of the reviewers were saying, just 12-18 months ago, how little they picked up their X-E1 (and X-E2 for that matter) for - some were picking up X-E2’s for <£100! You’d be lucky to get one for less than £300 now.

The same thing is happening with lenses. Although, I noticed used Fuji lenses tend to never really change in price all that much (I admittedly say this 3 years experience of shooting with Fuji).
I buy and sell a lot of lenses, it’s much cheaper and simpler than renting and I’d say, on the whole, I’ve pretty much broken even on all my deals. However I have occasionally made a decent profit. Not that long ago, I sold a XF 23mm f1.4 and picked up both a Tokina 23mm f1.4 AND a XF 27mm f2.8 with the money - I only bought the Fuji 23mm for £300 towards the end of 2021.

robert1955 said:

DanFry said:

robert1955 said:

DanFry said:

Tak K said:

My X100S is dying and I was looking to get another second-hand Fujifilm from ebay (UK) and I noticed that there don't seem to be many X100 series listed on ebay as previously and prices are up. For example the X100S seems to be around £450. When I bought mine 5 years ago, they were £350-£400. XE-3 are around £380-£450. They were around £300 a year ago.

Are others seeing this?

Maybe it's inflation, fall in the pound or component shortages stopping people buying new cameras? Or maybe people have stopped buying new cameras all together?

What's going on?

Click to expand...

Or Fujifilm taking wrong turns, and hence current users not being keen to upgrade? That is the case for me, since X-H1. Sorry, but I can't say it often enough.

Dan

Click to expand...

Irrelevant as this is about eBay mostly. Repeating a silly statement does not make it smart

Click to expand...

Hard to follow my reasoning, isn't it Robert ;-)

Dan

Click to expand...

There is none

Click to expand...

Oh sorry Robert, how can I help you?

Dan

Tak K said:

Jeff Biscuits said:

I’ve been buying and selling a lot over the past 18 months and yes, prices have gone up a bit. All the X100 models seem to often fetch around £100 more than they did a year ago, but that’s certainly not always the case. In the last week or so I’ve seen at least two original X100s go for just over £200. My belief is that the shortage of new X100Vs has buoyed used prices and that’s trickled down through the older versions. But, to be fair, other X System models have been attracting higher prices too.

But you do have to bear a few things in mind with eBay. Firstly, asking prices aren’t selling prices: lots of people aim for crazy money and fail to sell. Secondly, you can absolutely still get a bargain if you’re canny—but you have to put the effort in. But thirdly, despite what you might expect, eBay isn’t the cheapest place to buy and never was. I rarely buy from eBay but I always sell there…

Just keep plugging away; if you’re prepared to spend time watching then you’ll find what you want at a good price.

Click to expand...

Thanks. My perception is that there used to be a lot of private seller auctions of Fujifilm cameras on eBay. Now, it's full of "Buy it now" at very high prices. So maybe, as you say, I just need to keep looking for a good find...

Click to expand...

Some of this is ebay's fault because they've changed their fee scheme to discourage anything other than an open, reserve-less auction... And who wants to do that when you're selling something worth hundreds of dollars. So you either start the listing at the price you want right of the bat, which is much more than the commercial sellers are starting at (so you get little to no action) or you skip the auction hassle and just set a buy it now at the price you want. Joe's camera can afford to risk listing their XT1 at $25 starting, I can't because with my luck the listing will get buried and it'll end up going for $35.

Also don't underestimate the YouTube influence. There are about a billion "xxx old Fuji camera, still awesome in 2022" videos out there. Those DO drive market demand.

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