Second hand lenses price guide?

If I want to buy a second hand car, there are a couple of price guides that list all the makes, models, years, with prices that a buyer might expect to pay.

Is there anything resembling this in the second hand lens market that would give someone recently afflicted with a bad case of LBA a starting point?

TIA

There are two distinct markets for second-hand gear.

The first is the camera shops, and a glance through the ads in AP will give you an idea of what they are charging. There are also one or two largely web-based sellers like Ffordes (I refuse on principle to spell it with an initial lower-case F).

https://secure.ffordes.com/index.htm

Second, there is the private market, mainly Ebay (same applies).

J Colwell (an American) used to keep tabs on Ebay prices, and his site is here:

http://www.jcolwell.ca/photography/lens$db/

I haven't looked at it for a while, so I don't know how up to date it is.

Hope that helps.

G

McKeowan's Price Guide to Antique and Classic Cameras. HC £100 PB £90.

This covers all the manual focus stuff at least.

Otherwise, a copy of AP will give you a pretty good idea and a look on eBay will clinch it!

Hi Chris,

Really the short answer is NO. These price guides that do exist are well out of date the moment they come to print, let alone some time later.

The camera market is now, due to digital, far more fluid than it used to be and far more fluid than the car market, making any lens or camera price guides fairly pointless.

There are, or were, several USA guys with ebay price guides on the web, but they used ebay.com for their prices, they were all specialised guides, one was for Canon FD, one for Olympus OM , one for Pentax K etc and they used to be useful, because the ebay prices about 3-6 years ago were fairly steady, but more recently these guys stopped keeping track of prices since they became increasingly heywire. So the ebay price guides left on the web are hopelessly out of date now.

The best guide are the ad's in AP, since most of the dealers in there (though not all) have a fair grip on what the 'going rate' is for most items. You can look at the recently 'completed items' on ebay, but this only goes back about 4-6weeks and bearing in mind these are auction prices, they can vary wildly at times. They also vary between the UK site, the USA site and others.

Pentax lens prices have kept changing over the last 4 years. I buy and sell MF camera items for a hobby and have kept track of ebay.co.uk prices all this time.

Lots of Pentax lenses were easy to find only 3 years ago, even the 85/1.4 A* the 300/4 A* the SMC 85/1.8 K and other fairly scarce lenses USED to be regularly for sale on ebay, but over the last two years this has changed. Many of the scarcer and more desirable lenses are now being held onto and are VERY hard to find. The increased market penetration of Pentax DSLR's has made this situation occur, with more users wanting the older and well-thought of MF lenses.

cheers Steve.

Thanks for all your replies, guys. Can't say I'm surprised that there's no easy way!

I'll be getting a copy of AP (first for about 15 years) this afternoon!

And I've got about a dozen items on watch in ebay