Rebay

I am, I have come to realise, something of a hoarder of things. Not intentionally, really. Everything I purchase is bought with a firm use and goal in mind, and is kept for exactly that reason. I really do still want to play through the Legend of Zelda, which required buying the cart and the N64 to play it on. The fact that I don’t have time to play the games I have for the consoles actually currently attached to the telly, let alone the ones in boxes in the corner of the room, is besides the point.

At any rate, I’ve decided there’s a helluva lot of stuff lying around that’s going to be of more use to someone other than me, and a lot of it was photo gear. This is a win/loss record of those transactions, mainly for my own edification, but perhaps might be of use to someone studying Olympus camera gear depreciation,

Olympus E-1: The first of Olympus’ forays into the digital arena, this pro-level, weather-sealed monster was a lot of fun to use, and despite the limited resolution took photos as good as, and some would say better than, the current gear. It was a loveable, ergonomic beast, substantial without being overwhelmingly heavy and in general a lot of fun to have. Still, it shows its age badly, and as a child of the modern era being shorn of the excellent Oly image stabilisation system and it’s quirky auto-ISO handling often lead to me botching shots I would otherwise have got. Pilot error, of course, but it meant that the camera was left on the shelf more often than not and so had to find a new home. Bought: 27/09/2010 for £175.00. Sold: 14/01/2011 for £110.00. Lost my proverbial shirt on it. It’s an abnormally low price for it to go at. Not sure what happened there, bad timing perhaps.

Olympus 25mm Pancake: What a lovely little lens. Little being the correct word, as attached to the E-510 or E-600 it became a pocketable DSLR ‘solution’, as long as part of your solution is a coat with big pockets. At f2.8 it’s a pretty decent and very cost-effective portrait lens, but I had a hankering for faster glass that eventually left this surplus to requirements. Bought: 18/06/2009 for £147.00. Sold: 14/01/2011 for £146.00. Can’t argue with that result. Basically a year and a half rental for one hundred pence.

Olympus 8mm Fisheye: My first wideangle experience, much to my buddy Craig’s displeasure. But, screw that guy, I like fisheye effects. For a while, the highest quality lens I had, it got great results but results that couldn’t be used all that often unless you wanted to become known as’that fisheye guy’. Which led to it often being left at home, which led to it being partly forgotten about, especially after moving to the stellar 7-14mm lens. So onwards it travelled. Bought: 23/08/2009 for £310.00. Sold: 14/01/2011 for £332.09. Effectively, I was paid to photograph with this lens. I’m a pro! Well, maybe not, but it’s a net gain for me.

Sigma 18-125mm: Here’s a lens that was massively underused. It’s not that it’s a bad lens, by any stretch, and it seemed to cover a very useful range. The intention was that this would be a great ‘walkaround’ lens, for the times when I want to travel light. It more or less fulfilled that, although I often wanted to go a little wider than this let me. The downfall was that if I really wanted to travel light, I’d be carrying around my Canon S90, not a DSLR, and those times I was prepared to carry a DSLR, then I’d also be happy enough to lug around a bag of lenses as well. Bought: 16/04/2010 for £88.00. Sold: 14/01/2011 for £72.00. Well, a net loss of £16 for a poorly thought out idea isn’t too bad.

Some other, non-photo stuff:

Samsung Q1: Before there was the iPad, there was the lumpen, mis-shapen beasts called the Tablet PC, of which Samsung made quite a few. Hobbled by Microsoft’s need to have Windows running on everything, regardless of how well it suited the device, this turned out to be a wretched, glacially slow, unresponsive and fiddly experience that put me right off tablet computing in general. I’d bought it more or less on a whim to see if there was any room or need in my life for a tablet computer, with an eye on getting the then-upcoming, possibly just rumoured iPad. In retrospect, I might as well have bought a horse-drawn carriage to see if I needed a Ferrari. Bought: 29/07/2009 for £180.00. Sold: 11/04/2010 for £150.99. A frustrating, failed experiment, but not one that left me out of pocket too badly.

Palm Treo Pro: I used to love my Palm based PDA’s, either from Palm or the Sony Clie range. Enabled a lot of mobile work, in the pre-iPhone era. This was purchased partly to see what Palm was up to, after a long period of not paying much attention to the company, and partly to find out if Windows Mobile was really as loathsome as it was made out to be. Spoiler – it was. In spades. Bought: 19/12/2009 for £77.00. Sold: 11/04/2010 for £46.11. I’d probably have paid that much to have someone take it away from me.

There’s more I could list, but the exact records have been lost in prior email purges.Anyway, I must go and tend to the N64 game auctions that are barrelling towards a close as I type.

One thought on “Rebay

  1. Good riddance to the fisheye, big guy. Novelty bollocks best forgotten about. Let us never speak of it again.

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