"Like her or not a Leica's expensive"!

[Benedictine]

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Googling around for Leica III I came across this in The Times newspaper archive dated 17th. September 1979. Thought it might be of interest to some folk. The prices quoted for used equipment is revealing. £65 in 1979 = £343.20 today, £200 = £105640! By these figure I got a good deal for the Leica IIIB with lens I have recently bought!

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[earleygallery]

Blimey! Thoroughbred Camras of Ashtead! I bought my Bronica from them and also first tried a Leica SLR in that shop! Long since gone (the shop not the Leica or Bronica).

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[greyelm]

I think your maths are a little out, if £65 = £343.20 then £200 = £1056

[luigi bertolotti]

Indeed, as for my feeling, the classic Barnacks have NOT gone on a rising curve, in term of cost, in the last 25-30 years : they KEEP a value but demand, imho, is "flat" and prices do in consequence. Probably things are different for real rarities or for items in exceptional conditions. And I think that same applies to classic M bodies : I bought my M4 (good user - not collector) in 1988 and NOW I could by another at the same cost , around.

I have never followed with care the Leica Reflex market... but have the feel that probably it has even gone through a long and costant slip : I remember distinctly that MANY (20 or so) years ago I toyed time to time with the idea of taking a SL2... it had a certain aura... but it was definitely COSTLY (and always found some other item to add to my RF collection, without "diverting" )

, nowadays, seems to me that decent SL2 bodies tend to have "normal" costs...

Edited July 19, 2017 by luigi bertolotti

[wlaidlaw]

Just a few weeks ago, I bought a mint IIIg. This camera looks like it had never been used and the only thing that will need attention in due course is that the slow speeds are a little bit but not too much slow. I paid €500 (£440) for this camera including a IIIg case (the wrong one for a 3/8 screw and much more worn than the camera). I think in the UK a IIIg body was around £130 including purchase tax and import duty in 1957. Corrected for inflation, that is just under £3000 today. You can see therefore that Barnacks have not come close to keeping pace with inflation. My father I seem to recall paid just under £150 for my M4 body, which was a demo camera but only a few days old in July 1967 (purchase tax had been reduced from 1957). Even though it is in very nice condition today with a recent total rebuild by CRR in Luton, I doubt if it would fetch much more than £650, maybe a little more in view of its being a very early M4 (#47 of the production cameras). The original purchase price inflation corrected is £2500. 

 

Second hand Leicas today are excellent value. 

 

Wilson

Edited July 19, 2017 by wlaidlaw

[pico]

As a working bloke fifty-two years ago I sometimes imagined that Leica had been following my income and increasing their prices accordingly for decades.  In 1965 I paid $225 USD for a new M2 with 50mm Summicron. At that time it was three months wages.

 

I am wondering if now with our ageing, retiring constituency that Leica is factoring our retirement investments. Seriously, kidding, smiling.

 

Leica has nothing many of us cannot afford, but we are not stupid!

 

Funny, but there is a strange sliding scale where persons know that purchasing a highly desired thing might be more compelled if they can just barely afford it. It seems so precious. At the same time someone with a lot of money can step back with a new perspective and reject the same. There seems to be an antagonistic coupling psychology at work.

Edited July 19, 2017 by pico

[willeica]

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I must sound like a broken record by now mentioning this site http://collectiblend.com/Cameras/Leitz/. I might add that I have no connection whatsoever with the site. What it is, is a tracker of auction results for various camera types, including Leica, broken down by model. It also shows a curve which is made up of such auction results. In most cases the curve for Leica models has been fairly flat over the past 10 to 15 years. In the case of some rare models there is an upward trend. Another common curve shows a bump during the 'spike' in values between 5 and 10 years ago with prices returning to where they were before that time.

 

Making long term estimations of value using CPI is very dangerous. For a start, a lot of other things have changed over the last 50 years or so. Pay rates have increased, but you also have to look at purchasing power and patterns. Most people today spend a lot more of their income on housing and lot less of it on food than people did 50 years ago. Car ownership has increased and so also has the range of items on which we spend our income eg computers and broadband. In addition, debt levels and attitudes to debt have changed. 50 years ago you either saved to buy something or you bought it on higher purchase. Determination of values is best left to the market or 'the eye of the beholder'. There is only a broad value in the market and prices can vary a lot, particularly at auctions.

 

Buying cameras as an investment in expectation of price increases is a dangerous thing. I have bought mine either as collector's items or just to use them. Sometimes you can be lucky like the woman who bought Neil Armstrong's Moon bag which is going up for auction later today. However, buying in anticipation of a profit is best left to dealers who have a much broader market information base to work with. A major UK Leica dealer told me recently that the collector market was 'dead' because fellows like me have too many cameras and won't sell them. My own observation from following auctions and sales is that more rare models like I Model A will probably gain some value, but more common ones like IIIc and IIIf will probably stay more or less where they are for some time to come. 

 

Collecting cameras is a great hobby. My advice is always to buy what you like and what you can afford. The one big imponderable is the possible value of digital models far into the future. A lot of them may break down and not be capable of being repaired. How the market will treat such items is impossible to predict. In a way a far safer bet is to stick to the film models and hope that 35mm film will be around for as long as you live.

 

William

[chris_livsey]

Interesting read how so few of those dealers are left but the cameras they sold are.

The market has changed again with the internet, M bodies in the UK are very thin on the ground at the moment, dealers with previously large inventories are down to a handful at best, the cause, the reduced value of the pound against other currencies and the buying opportunity from none EU countries with the 20% VAT off in addition has had a significant effect I am told.

Interesting that I too have a recent Barnack purchase of a IIIg  with one of those modern fashionable leather half cases with red stitching and a 50mm Color Skopar plus the fancy "proper" hood in at least mint- to Exc +++ for £500 they are certainly down on a few years ago when body only was pushing towards £1,000, not complaining as a buyer though.

[willeica]

Collectiblend shows a fall in USD from $1250 in 2006 to $770 in 2016 for the IIIg. http://collectiblend.com/Cameras/Leitz/Leica-IIIg.html  That is for auction quality stuff, of course. If I might contrast this with a 4 digit I model A, that would have increased in value from $1630 to $1880 between 2003 and 2016 http://collectiblend.com/Cameras/Leitz/Leica-I-Mod-A-(4-digits-Number).html. The IIIg must be probably classified as a somewhat rare user model, whereas 4 digit I Model A would probably count as rare collector model.  I hope that this illustrates what I was saying earlier.

 

William

Edited July 20, 2017 by willeica

[jc_braconi]

Buying used items in europe is less expensive and so interesting because there is no VAT and no customs to pay

[UliWer]

Of course you pay VAT in Europe - the price tag generally includes the VAT. Only some auction sites just give the prices without VAT, but you have to add it anways. Any professional sellar has to deliver the normal VAT-rate (e.g. 19% in Germany). Only private sales are not obliged to pay VAT - though it is not always easy to know which sellar is only private and who does it professional.

[schattenundlicht]

Of course you pay VAT in Europe - the price tag generally includes the VAT. Only some auction sites just give the prices without VAT, but you have to add it anways. Any professional sellar has to deliver the normal VAT-rate (e.g. 19% in Germany). Only private sales are not obliged to pay VAT - though it is not always easy to know which sellar is only private and who does it professional.

To my knowledge (*), in several European countries there is a thing like "Differenzbesteuerung" (literally translated 'differential taxation') where a professional dealer in second hand items only has to calculate VAT on the difference between his acquisition price and his selling price.

 

*: Which may not be worth much, neither being a lawyer nor a tax consultant.

[wlaidlaw]

I posted this on another thread but it is relevant to the values of Leica cameras 

 

Wilson

 

 

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[mickjazz]

Interesting that Leica lens body prices adjusted for cpi are relatively cheaper today. We've all done the math. Of course for some myself included it's as Einstein said 'relative' since I bought my first Leica anything in 2009. Also there's some skewing in the trend in that one compares NEW in 19xx with USED in 2017. I imagine a new in the box 1932 Leica II would fetch a decent price at Sothebys and more than cover cpi.

 

However, while camera bodies and lenses may not have tracked exactly with cpi, the odds and ends little stuff like lens hoods have done extremely well. If in 1950 you took a long shot and bought a 1000 soohn soobk and flqoo fookh shades for $1-$2 each (Leitz NY), you would have done just fine. You would need a safe to store them.

 

The other thing is digital and the manner in which digital cameras of all types depreciate at an inverse to cpi times 30.

 

Ken Rockwell - the guy everyone hates I guess but me - makes the point repeatedly that digital cameras/bodies depreciate like laptops or phones. A Leica M7 will depreciate which is normal for used stuff but it's not like throwing $$$ out the car window.