Last night I was looking through Gumtree (a free ads site in Britain that is actually an eBay subsidiary), looking for interesting offers, when I found someone a couple of miles away who had an Eos 300D listed (with a link to an eBay listing) at £1. So I clicked through to eBay and yes, it was advertised as working, with a minimum bid of 99p - and a buy it now price of £1! So naturally I bought it. What I expected was that I'd get a "sorry, there was a mistake in the listing" message and a refund. What I got was the name and address for collecting it and a pick-up time this afternoon. My initial thought was that they somehow hadn't noticed that they got it wrong. Or that it was sort of scam. Or You've Been Framed / Candid Camera / some other reality show thing. Or something like the apocryphal story of the guy whose will said his valuables should be sold and the proceeds given to his mistress, but left his wife in charge of administering the estate... the car version of this has someone getting a Rolls for £50, the camera version is a load of Leica gear for a tenner, and so forth. So an hour or so ago I turned up, expecting there to be problems. Instead a very nice young lady invited me in and gave me the camera, a charger, and a spare battery that she thought was faulty. I didn't actually say "do you realise you sold me this for a pound?" but so far as I could make out she's bought a better body and didn't think it was worth the hassle of trying to get a high price for the old one, so advertised it cheaply to get rid of it to a good home. I've tested it, and it's working perfectly. Condition is even more worn than mine, but the battery in the camera is good, it takes pictures, focuses lenses, etc. etc. I'm going to give it a few days just to make sure that there's no second thoughts etc., then see if any of my family want it - one of my nieces was after an SLR a couple of years ago, not sure she'll want one with this low a specification but it never hurts to ask. I don't currently have any spare Eos lenses but several have come my way recently, I might pick up another. If she isn't interested it'll be a nice one to list on eBay. They don't go for a huge amount, but I can be pretty sure I'll get my money back!
Last week I got a non-working Sony XEN-5 for £30, spent another £10 on a battery, charger, and memory, and now have a very nice camera. But today a job lot of lenses I'd bought arrived and they were rubbish, virtually nothing usable. Swings and roundabouts...
A weird footnote to this - I've been thinking of getting a better Canon body and eventually using Canon as my main system (at the moment I'm still much more invested in Nikon, but it's relatively easy to get good Canon gear at a realistic price, whereas Nikon gear is a LOT more expensive). So yesterday I went to a car boot sale (US equivalent "swap meet") where one of the stalls had a load of old lenses and converters - mostly junk - and among them was a 400D body. So I got two lenses - a rare manual Kyocera 135 f2.3 (yes, really f2.3), unfortunately with slight discoloration of the cement in the front element and the weird Miranda M46 screw mount which is more or less impossible to adapt to anything useful, the other a no-name 300mm f5.6 mirror lens with serious fungus - four converters of dubious use (e.g. Canon FL), the 400D body, and a copy of Photoshop Elements... for a total of £25. There's no battery so I've ordered a battery and charger, won't know if the camera works until it arrives. And as luck would have it I'm headed off on holiday tomorrow, so I won't be able to test it until this time next week. But who knows, I might get lucky again.
After some delays the verdict is that it almost works - it powers up etc., but I'm getting card errors and it looks like some pins are bent. It will take a photo without the card, but doesn't appear to have any memory apart from the card so that's not a lot of use. Really don't want to try fixing this myself, so I've just asked for some quotes on a service.
Just listed the 400D on eBay UK, see my post to Classifieds if you're interested. The quotes I got for a repair were considerably more than what CEX (a chain of second-hand shops) charge for a working body with warranty...
