Don’t buy a used camera unless you are getting a mind blowing deal from someone you know or unless you just love to gamble. Most cameras that are sold used have between 1,000 and 4,000 hours of use on them. (That’s sort of like buying a car with between 150,000 and 400,000 miles on it.) After that much time, anything could happen to cause the camera to stop working after you’ve received it.
2.
Be prepared to buy an extended warranty. This won’t necessarily get you a better price, but it will help keep you from getting into trouble after you purchase your camera. The reason why this is an important issue is because, with the falling prices on cameras, the warranty coverage on a camera has decreased as well. In the past, many cameras had at least a year warranty, and some had three or four year warranties. Now, the average is 90 days of labor and one year of parts replacement, which means you have a 90 day warranty. (An authorized repair center must request the parts for the remaining nine months of part coverage, so you’re still paying for the labor at those service centers.) I personally got a four year warranty with the DVX100B, both because I like that level of protection and because we all know that cameras wait until the day after your warranty period ends to blow up on you. Be aware, though, not all warranties are the same. We’ll cover that in the next point!
3.
Look for a Mack Warranty. No, we are not getting paid anything from this company to mention their name nor are we saying that you need to buy an extended warranty. Instead, I personally noticed that most of the dealers that Panasonic had listed on their web page offered Mack Warranties. This is because Mack tends to deal with people who are dealing in legitimate merchandise. I noticed that shadier online sellers that couldn’t offer Mack Warranties instead offered much costlier warranties by companies without Mack’s reputation.
As to whether you purchase a Mack Warranty, this is completely up to you and matters largely whether you feel comfortable and have had good experience with extended warranties in the past. From personal experience, the writers on this magazine have been pretty satisfied with Mack Warranties, although you may be looking at a few weeks to two month turnaround for a repair or replacement of your camera. This would be a very costly turnaround for a full-service video production company, but is less of an issue for most microfilmmakers, who would find the cost of replacing a camera far more detrimental than rescheduling a shoot to a later date. (Which is logically why the Mack Warranty is $170 for four years on a sub-$5,000 camera, whereas a full-service warranty on the same price camera for video production companies from a manurfacturer like Sony with four day tournaround is $4,000 for that same four year period.)
Which leads us to the next step…
4.
Use ResellerRatings.com and other consumer advocacy websites to see how the stores you find stack up.Bizrate.com and other groups also provide helpful consumer information, but I’d start with ResellerRatings.com, as it has one of the highest levels of respect in the professional community. If you type in a name for a store or website, they will tell you what score that store or website has received in the last six months and in its lifetime. Additionally, they will show you the specific comments from all the folks who have voted.
5.
When reading consumer reviews, read the negative comments even about stores and sites with high ratings. The reason to read these is to find out if the complaints are the typical “I didn’t read the ad correctly and now I’m going to whine about it” complaints or if they have a connected, cohesive feel to them. For example, we found a very good company called The Camera Box that had a 9.0 average for six month reviews and an 8.6 average for lifetime reviews. (To give you some perspective, that’s slightly higher than B&H Photo’s average. Although, admittedly, B&H clearly does more business.) Of the few issues they did have, most of them were with people who didn’t read the ad correctly or with people who wanted something shipped to a place that didn’t gel with their credit card billing address (which the site clearly says they won’t do). However, I noticed that one issue that cropped up was with an apparently Gray Market SLR camera. (Gray Market items are items that are being sold in a country they weren’t manufactured for. These items have voided warranties because they were not intended for the nations they are being sold in, but the gray market is not actually illegal.) A few people mentioned it, making me realize that this was a cohesive issue and I made sure to verify that the camera I was interested in would be the US version, and not a gray market version. Which leads us to our next point…
6.
Contact the company who makes the camera you wish to buy and tell them that you are planning to purchase a camera from a dealer in the future, so you can get the correct country SKU#. Explain that you want to be sure that you are ordering from a legitimate dealer, and ask them what the camera’s SKU# is for the country you live in. (For example, although the DVX100B’s model number is “AG-DVX100B,” its U.S. SKU# is “AG-DVX100BP.” Don’t ask me why the “P” stands for the “U.S.”, it just does. I’ve confirmed it with two sources at Panasonic.)
