Camera shops diappearing

Where I live, there are no camera shops left. There are department stores which sell P/S cameras and maybe one low-end DSLR. There is a camera shop about 40 min away. It seems that consumers don't care to kave a brain sell them a camera. They read the reviews on the inter-net and then buy what they want. If I want a good DSLR, I have to buy it on-line. I am about to spend 7,000 quid on ew gear. I wander how the manufacturers will react to the new reality.

I live in the middle of nowhere and all the towns are a little bit of a ride away but there a camera shops in several of them (including SRS). Internet sales are impacting on many areas, not just camera shops: books and CDs are good examples. My lady love has purchased everything from shovels to underwear from amazon.com!

Best wishes, Kris.

You don't know what you have until it's gone! We all wan't everything at a cheaper price and I guess the long term price is that you will not be able to touch products until you have paid for them, as we wont be able to walk into a shop and pick something up. If we wan't the small shops to survive we have to use them, the question is how much are we willing to pay to keep them?

But if the smaller shops aren't there for you , you CAN'T use them .

It's a chicken and egg situation.

Fortunately here we do have one excellent shop - but it doesn't sell Pentax

If I want Pentax stuff - then I'm forced online and I'd prefer to see something and handle it before I buy it when I'm parting with , what to me is a lot of my hard earned cash from my working days .

We have one shop left in West Wiltshire - and it sells Pentax!
It is the only one - I would need more than the fingers of one hand to count those that have closed (including three that I have bought kit from in the past).
Bath still has a couple, ditto Bristol, ditto South Wales. So then you look at their prices, and the Internet prices, and when the saving gets to be into two figures (sometimes into three figures), not counting the cost-per-mile to get there, and you can tell the future quite easily.
But then, you could put this down to the rise of Digital Photography. I had a film (yes, a real film) processed a week ago, and I was the only person at the counter. Even the bank of "print your own" machines were empty. Cheap cameras, cheap printers, cheap inks, cheap paper, all these add up to a big drop in the steady bread-and-butter trade.
It's called Progress
Geoff

you are all right. Technology impacts how we live. I remember photoalbums and still enjoy showing my prints to friends, but there is no reason to do that when you have DVD and a digital camera. Just because you have the technology, doen't mean it's a good thing. we are becomming an impersonal society and one form of communication, is taking pictures. A poicture may be worth more than a thousand words when we stop talking to each other

My nearest Pentax dealer is in Bahrain.....

You should be able to send it back within a time limit if the product was not what you expected it to be when buying on line and they must refund you fully.

Still it's a pain when you want to try out two lenses to see which one is better

Or if you want to hold a camera and see if it will actually fit you - weightwise and sizewise.

We keep telling people to go and try them in their hands before buying - then decide what they will buy - this becomes difficult if there is no dealer within reach.

Are camera shops a thing of the past?

I ask the question following a trip into Newcastle upon Tyne where we used to have Jessops, Jacobs and Bonsors, a small independent.

We know what happened to the two chains and this morning I find Bonsors has also closed its doors. Last year independents also closed in Darlington and Middlesbrough.

I suppose they are suffering, the same as other retailers, from the internet. I'm a culprit, wanting the best deal, but you can't easily compare things when you can't see or feel them.

I wonder if all the high street shops go, will there be a market for walk in centers charging to inspect things before they are bought on the internet?

Would you really pay to inspect something? :

There might be a logic to something like an 'Amazon Electrical & Photo Centre', where you could go and try stuff and talk to sales advisors, and complete your online order in-store. Not sure whether it would be viable though.

Maybe not, but I do think internet sellers are benefiting after people inspect things on the high street. What are sellers and manufacturers going to do if there is nowhere to display there goods?
Maybe not a good example, but at least at Argos they will take things out of the box before you have to part with your cash.

I am not surprised smaller photographic shops are disappearing at a rapid rate.

A few years ago I went into my local photo dealer for a jobo dev tank, although I could have saved a bit buying on-line, I wanted to support him, well not only did he want to charge the full price, he also wanted me to pay a premium for getting it in, I went to Amazon.

Buying kit on-line, is not too onerous these days, with plenty of reviews, but we have excellent retailers, such as SRS to help.

When I wanted to buy my first DSLR [Olympus E1] I went to my local jessops, they wanted me to part with a 25% non refundable deposit, on top of charging full price, no wonder they went down the pan

I suspect it's more likely that buyers will order goods in, inspect them, and keep or reject them within 7 days. This is not a great way to do business and would lead to masses of previuously handled "new" goods and masses of refurbished items. Prices would go up, no doubt.

Putting shop premises in every town to inspect goods? That means staff, rents, and soon we are back to square one but with new names replacing the old.

I can see an "Amazon Super Store" coming our way eventually, on an Asda-like scale.