Well this month started out with the fuji S5. It was time to sell my beast pentax 6x7 camera that seems to weigh 30 pounds and Ken Rockwell recommended Adorama for their used equipment. I spoke to their used manager and we had a great talk. It was no risk. we offer 70% of our sale price. No muss no worries. Great! I'll send you two boxes.
At the end lest minute I decided NOT to send my rare manual ais lenses and just kick off the Nikon d7000 and the Pentax and some newer lenses.
Well. the first red herring is that I never got back a clear price list of their offer. The Pentax body goes for about 300 and the lens goes for about 300. Thats 600 bucks just for that. finally I had a phone call with a fellow named Jack. Jack was a fast talker, a wheeler dealer. First he says he evaluated all the stuff I sent and it has a worth of 800 dollars. I had sent them over two thousand dollars worth of stuff so immediately I began to hiccup. The d7000 alone was selling used for 650. So this was quite outrageous low balling. I said no no thats crazy, how much just for the Pentax and it's rare leaf shutter lens (the best lens for that camera and very rare). 210 bucks. In need of some cash, I begrugdgingly accepted it. It should have been 400 bucks. Not good. when I told him the dollar amount for the rest wasnt even close to reality he asked if they had anything I might trade for.
Therein I commited my error. I stupidly went in for a deal to trade my d7000 a 1`6mp camera that retails for 1200 for a 3 year OLDER fuji S5 which sells used for 500. What the heck!
Well you have to understand after two years of studio portraits I just could NOT get the color right, and yes I did white balancing in studio I even had a special cap for it. I still could not make sense of their colors even in Nikons CapturePlus software. the fuji had been designed with dual sensors to be like film. with huge dynamic range and no clipping. But more important than all that was it's color rendition.. it made people look like people. Now Nikons d700 was not bad, not as good as the fuji but not vbad, but its selling used for 1500 so I thought that was a goal too high to reach. Well a straight swap of a 1200 camera for a 500 dollar camera doesn't interest adorama they want THREE lenses also. What! THats NUTSO! In the end and only because it was on the phone they got TWO three hundred dollar lenses, a 1200 d7000 new in box, all for a s5 which was promised in good mildly used condition. I hung up. What have I done.
the first horror was I never got all my stuff back. I had towrite and write and write and finally I got two of the lenses. They were still holding a 300 dollar 85mm 1.4 rokinon lens and my d7000's battery grip. I wrote and protested to high heaven saying.. well give me the d700 then if you are gonna hijack my stuff. Eventually I got the 85mm back. But not the grip. I was screwed over. But at least the s5 was pristing and ....
BUT IT WASNT IT WAS JUNK! CRAZY! It looked OK on the outside ONLY because they had repalced the rubber. I knew this cause the color stripe, black on a real s5, was back to nikon RED, aka a nikon replacement kit. And the shutter actuations was 86,000, meaning... all used up. Worse, the viewfinder had beenreplaced with some terrible military one with lines all over it! What the hell!!! at least 60 bucks to replace it. ugh. groan. sigh. life sucks then you die.
Well live and learn. Ken Rockwell please update your web site to no longer recommend selling used equipment to Adorama. I'm stickin with KEH from now on.
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