I'm from Cairns, Tropical North Queensland. Apart from cyclones every year that threaten to blow us all to buggery, its not a bad place in the world.
Don't forget here in Australia you have very aggressive Canon distributors where you don't have to go overseas to get good priced Canon gear and where they discount their gear very heavily to educational/technical colledge areas in the hope of influencing young people into their brand, which of course happens.
Up until recently we've only had Maxwell as the sole Australian distributor for Nikon in Australia and in my opinion because of their rorting pricing policies on Nikon gear they have done more harm to the brand than I like to think. You can buy Nikon gear in the US for normal prices, have it air freighted over, pay the GST and end up with gear still 10 to 30% less than you could if you purchased here. Absolutely insane but thankfully this is changing now Nikon have given Maxwell the flick (or at least I hope it is).
I feel Fujifilm in Brookvale are also adopting a rather elitist pricing policy for the Fuji product distributed here in Australia. Again you can go overseas for an S5 have it landed here in your hands and end up with enough saved to buy a brand new SB600 outright (well, close enough).
The result is Canon have made enormous inroads into all DSLR markets here and its not necessarily based on the quality of their actual product either.
But try it yourself, go into any photographic retailer in Australia and the vast majority will try to sell you the Canon product. Heaps more money to be made and commission/bonuses offerings for sales people is equally alluring. You can't blame them.
I have a Fuji S3, five lenses and an SB600, a very modest kit. Everything was purchased overseas and as a result I saved myself in the area of $2,000.00. Now that's a pretty nice saving but it serves to show that greed at the wholesale level is still playing its part in keeping Nikon and Fuji customers to a minimum here in Australia. It has nothing to do with the retailers.
The old argument about "serviced locally" doesn't wash with me. So it stays in the air for a few hours longer to get serviced or fixed if need be, so what? I have more confidence in an official service center in Japan or in the US than I do here anyway.
Point is until the time comes where something changes in the pricing policies of Fujifilm and Nikon here we are not likely to see the numbers of Australians using Fuji or Nikon pro-sumer DSLR gear as there should be, so don't expect too many from Australia on DPReview.
(Gee that was a bit of a ramble wasn't it?)
Cheers
Papa Tango
