How to Buy a Film Camera on eBay for a Good Price: A Step-by-Step Guide

Why should you listen to me?

I founded Ausgeknipst seven years ago now. Back then it was just me, and instead of making accessories and spare parts for film cameras, I was buying film cameras, lenses and accessories on eBay, checking them over, repairing them in my room in a shared flat and (usually) selling them on at a profit.

Buying and selling film cameras is how I paid my way through my second degree. In this guide I want to pass on everything I’ve learned over the last 7 years. Even if you have no plans to open a camera shop and are simply hunting for a bargain, it should help you out.

P.S. These days Ausgeknipst mainly sells accessories for film cameras that we make ourselves. Which means I can share my “secret knowledge” with you here with a clear conscience ;)

The same seven years on video, if you’d rather watch than read.

If you don’t know your way around, buy from a reputable dealer with a 30-day return policy

Every film camera on the market today is more than 30 years old, and roughly half of them are faulty to some degree. As a result, many private individuals who own these cameras know little or nothing about what exactly they’re selling, for example when they’re selling off their grandad’s estate. But even professional dealers often reach their limits when it comes to reliably testing every function.

There are several reasons for this. For one, they lack the necessary test equipment and the specific know-how; for another, a full inspection as laid out in the service manual simply doesn’t pay anymore. Stripping down, servicing and cleaning a film SLR usually takes a whole day. Hardly any customer can or will pay for a skilled camera technician to do that (and there are barely any of them left). So the effort is only really worth it for high-end professional cameras from Hasselblad, Leica, Alpa & Co.

The exception to this rule are a few specialist workshops that focus on one specific camera model. In Germany, for example, there is (or was, for many years) the so-called “OM Doctor” Frank Timmann, a specialist in repairing Olympus OM system cameras. I once had my own Kiev 88 medium format camera overhauled by Arax Foto in Ukraine, and it was affordable. Workshops like these can work faster and more efficiently because they know those particular cameras inside out. Beyond that, as far as I know, the only one managing this on a larger scale today is the Finnish dealer Kamerastore.com. To my knowledge, it’s the only professional film camera dealer that employs its own technicians to repair and overhaul film cameras and continues to train them.

If you don’t know much about film cameras, it’s wise to buy from a reputable dealer who accepts returns. That way you won’t be left footing the bill if something turns out to be faulty, and ideally you’ll end up with a working camera.

So where do you find these dealers? We’ve put together a list of the camera shops and specialist mail-order retailers in the German-speaking countries that still carry film gear: Film camera shops in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, with a map, a radius search and a filter for used cameras. Some of these shops check every camera before selling it and give you a warranty on it. You’ll pay more than on eBay, but in return you get exactly the peace of mind this chapter is all about.

Picking the right camera

There are dozens of camera makers and over 1,000 different models in all sorts of types, such as easy-to-use point-and-shoots, medium format cameras for professionals, large format cameras for photographers with artistic ambitions & much, much more. If you’re a complete beginner and just want to dip a toe into film photography, I always recommend starting with a 35mm SLR. It’s compact, versatile, affordable and in demand. So if you realise after a few months that the hobby isn’t for you, you can easily sell it again for the same price (especially if you’ve followed this guide and snagged a good bargain).

The most popular 35mm SLRs, sorted by brand:

Canon AE-1, A-1, F-1, FTb, T50, T70

Minolta SRT-101, X-700

Nikon EM, F2, F3, FE, FM, FM2

Olympus OM-1, OM-2

Pentax K1000, ME Super, MX, Spotmatic

If in doubt, you can't go wrong with any of these models. They're all fairly rugged cameras that have stood the test of time, and they're also easy to resell whenever you like.

Working Out What the Camera Is Worth

In most cases, all you need to get started is the camera body and a single lens. I'd recommend an original lens from the camera maker with a focal length of 35 mm or 50 mm (the so-called standard focal length). These lenses offer the best value for money and are fast, which helps when you're shooting indoors in low light. They're also easy to resell and, just like the 35 mm SLR itself, can be used for pretty much anything.

As a general rule, though, buying a job lot is the cheapest way to go. Online you'll often find bundles made up of several bodies, various lenses and accessories such as a flash, a motor winder, expired film and more. If you're confident you can sell on part of the gear, this is the cheapest way to get your dream kit. That's exactly what I did at the start of my “career”. If I wanted a Canon AE-1 with a 50 mm f/1.8 lens, for example, I'd buy a lot with the camera and 5 different lenses (including the 50 mm I was actually after). I simply sold the other 4 lenses again, and that paid for the camera.

eBay's Advanced Search

To find out what the camera, lot or set is worth, your best bet is eBay's “Advanced search”, filtering for “Completed items” and “Sold items”:

Ideally, set it to show only listings from Germany. I'd advise against buying from abroad, because it's always good to be able to send the camera back if it comes to that.

Depending on whether you'd rather take a chance or play it safe, you can also filter by seller type, “Business” or “Private”:

Return Periods for Business and Private Sellers on eBay

Business sellers have to give you a right of return of at least 14 days. That's enough time to unpack the camera and test it “dry”. Testing takes a bit of technical skill and, ideally, some previous experience with film cameras. If you're lacking one or both of these, you're better off buying from a dealer who offers a 30-day return period.

You'll find the return policy on the right, below the listing title.

With a 1-month return period, you have plenty of time to put a roll of film through the camera and get it developed. Faults often only show up once the film has been developed. If the camera turns out to be faulty, you can simply send it back.

With a private seller, returning an item like this is of course harder. Still, most sellers are happy to talk. If you've tested the camera after buying it and it doesn't work, or its condition and function don't match the listing description, be sure to get in touch with the seller, whether they're a private or a business seller.

Most eBay users care about keeping their good feedback score and are therefore cooperative. Even though private sellers don't have to take back the goods they've sold (legally speaking, it's a grey area at least), in most cases you can negotiate a partial refund. Either way, if there's a problem, it helps to open a return through eBay's returns system. If the seller refuses to cooperate, you can bring in eBay support after a certain period, and they'll mostly decide in your favour (meaning you get your money back), especially if the seller doesn't respond.

One thing to bear in mind: broken doesn't always mean broken. Most cameras you'll find online will have some fault or other, big or small. That's simply down to their age. Often you can live with the faults. A mechanical camera with a dead light meter, for example, works perfectly well with a handheld light meter or a light meter app on your smartphone, and you can easily replace faulty light seals yourself with our light seal kit. Things get trickier if the shutter is faulty. In that case, you can usually only return the camera or use it as a paperweight.

Working Out the Purchase Price: Searching Completed Listings

Below, I'll walk you through a real example search and show you how I'd go about it if I were buying a “working Canon AE-1 with an original Canon 50 mm f/1.8 lens”.

Example Price Search, Business Sellers: Canon AE-1 / Business Seller from Germany, Buy It Now

Once you've entered the search criteria (see above, e.g. business seller from Germany, Buy It Now), you'll see that a used, working Canon AE-1 with an original 50mm f/1.8 lens, for example, goes for between €150 and €190:

Analysis of the example search, checking prices from business sellers:

1. Canon AE-1 + 50 mm f/1.8 lens: exactly what we’re after, and from a seller with top-notch service and a huge amount of feedback (13,000 ratings). You can’t go wrong here, but this seller also got the highest price for the camera.
2. Canon AE-1 + 50 mm f/1.8 lens: this seller has far less experience, so they can’t ask the same price. Still, their feedback is excellent at an average of 98.8%, and as a business seller they offer a return window.
3. Canon AE-1 with a no-name zoom lens: even from the small thumbnail I can see that the third camera on the list sold with a cheaper zoom lens (not what we want)
4. Canon AE-1 without a lens: the fourth camera did come with its original box, but it sold with no lens at all.

So now I know that a (probably) working Canon AE-1 with a 50 mm lens is going to cost me between €150 and €190. Dealers usually have a pretty good idea of what their stock is worth, so real bargains are mostly wishful thinking here. Tip: business sellers often have “Make Offer” switched on. Knock about 10% off the actual price and send that as your offer. Most dealers will be happy to accept.

Example price check, private sellers: Canon AE-1 / private seller in Germany, Buy It Now

Want a real bargain? Then you’ll have to take a chance and buy from a private seller with no guarantee. That way you can get much better prices. In “Advanced Search” I now switch to completed listings from private sellers and get, for example, these four results:

Breaking down the price check, private sellers:

1. Canon AE-1 with 4 lenses + flash: one of the lenses is the 50 mm f/1.8 we’re looking for, and the other three plus the flash are a nice bonus that we might be able to resell. The price for this kit is the same as the second business listing above (for the same money we get more here, but with no right of return)
2. Canon AE-1 with original 35-105 mm f/3.5 lens: as an expert, I know the black Canon AE-1 fetches slightly higher prices because it’s rarer, and on top of that it sold here with a somewhat pricier lens. All in all, though, still not what we’re after.
3. Canon AE-1 with 35-70 mm 1:3.5-4.5 lens: The price is fair, but the lens doesn’t match what we’re searching for.
4. Canon AE-1 with 50 mm f/1.8 lens: Exactly what we’re after, from a private seller with 100% positive feedback. This would have been one to snap up. We’ll make a note of the €100 price for the kit we want.

Finding the right camera on Buy It Now

Next, we look at current Buy It Now listings from private sellers. I still search for just “Canon AE-1” and not “Canon AE-1 50 mm”, because a lot of private sellers have no idea how to name the lens properly. If the keyword you’re after (here, 50 mm f/1.8) isn’t in the title but the lens is included in the listing (you can tell from the photos), you’ll usually pay less than you otherwise would. The reason is simple: sellers who describe their gear well know what they’re doing and are more likely to know what price they can ask. This time I sort by “Lowest price” first and get these results:

Breaking down the search, private sellers:

1. Canon AE-1: body only, no lens: not for us
2. not a camera at all, just a special back: not for us
3. Canon AE-1 with zoom lens: not for us
4. Canon AE-1 with lens: I click through the photos and see in the fourth one that the camera is being sold as a set together with the lens we’re looking for:

Check the listing description, photos and feedback

So I could buy exactly the set I’m after for €80 from a private seller, although they only have relatively little feedback (12 ratings). On top of that, the 87.5% next to the seller’s name tells me they’ve received negative feedback. That’s a reason to be careful. Not every negative review is justified, but if in doubt, always read the negative feedback before you buy from a seller who has some (especially when it’s a private seller who doesn’t accept returns). Clicking on the feedback score shows me this:

The second review in particular puts me off, because it sounds like the seller had already sold this same listing once before and then wouldn’t ship it. So we keep looking.

So I scroll further down and find this listing for €85:

On the right of the photo I can see the 50 mm f/1.8 lens I’m looking for. There’s a zoom lens thrown in, too. The price is right. The only snag is that the seller has just 3 ratings. If in doubt, I check the feedback and the item description again:

The seller name “wilhol_0” suggests the user didn’t choose the name themselves. eBay often assigns usernames based on your first and last name. So the seller might be called Wilfried Hofmann or something similar. Most likely an older gentleman selling his old photo gear who doesn’t spend much time online. The item description only says “Also includes a Cullmann flash (30T-DS) and a shoulder bag”. In my experience, scammers don’t write like that. The three positive reviews sound good, too. You could safely go for this one, and the price is fair.

If I want to push the price down even further, I may have to be patient and keep an eye out for auctions.

Win the right camera at auction (for the best price)

The motto here: be patient, set up a saved search and use an auction sniper.

Not always, but more often than not, a little patience and bidding on auctions can get you better bargains than using “Buy It Now”.

When I search for auctions next, I get this list:

Analysis of the example search, auctions from private sellers:

1. Canon AE-1 with a 50 mm Makinon lens: not the original lens we wanted, but not bad for the price.
2. Canon AE-1 with a Canon 35-70 mm lens: not the 50 mm lens we wanted, but a good original Canon zoom instead.
3. Canon AE-1 Program with two lenses: this one is actually the pricier Canon AE-1 Program, but unfortunately paired with fairly cheap Soligor lenses.
4. Canon AE-1 Program: another AE-1 Program, this time with a Sigma zoom that’s fairly good because it’s fast.

Among the cheaper auctions today (19 Dec 2024), there wasn’t a single Canon AE-1 with a 50 mm f/1.8 lens. In other words: if you want a bargain, you have to be flexible. You won’t find a suitable auction at every moment. If you want your camera as soon as possible, you’ll have to compromise on the exact combination of camera + lens + accessories, or else set up a saved search and be patient.

And of course you never know what an auction will finally end up going for. In the last few minutes, bidders often get caught up in a bidding frenzy and end up paying more than they would have with Buy It Now. Ideally, that’s exactly what we want to avoid.

Extra software for serious collectors and resellers

If you have a bit of time and want to grab a real bargain, I recommend using a so-called auction sniper tool, such as the one from myibidder.com. You sign in there with your eBay account and set a maximum bid for the auction you’ve picked. The tool then places that bid in the last 8 seconds of the auction. The important thing is to enter your honest maximum bid right away (meaning: be honest with yourself). No more, no less. That way you avoid getting drawn into a bidding war where you and another bidder keep driving the price up, and you also avoid kicking yourself afterwards because someone else got the camera for a price you would have been able and willing to pay.

Using tools like this is somewhat controversial, but eBay tolerates it. If you want to play it completely safe, your only option is to set an alarm and place your bid yourself just before the auction ends.

If you want to take your eBay game to the next level, I’d recommend one more tool: Auctionsieve.

Auctionsieve lets you save searches just like eBay does (here they’re called sieves), but with the big advantage that you can:

1. save Catch Words: search terms that get pushed to the top of your results (in our case, that could be the name of the lens you’re after, such as “50 mm f/1.8” or similar)
2. save Trash Words: search terms that are hidden from your results straight away (for example, you can filter out cheap lenses from “Sigma”, “Tamron” and the like right from the start)
3. Hide what you’ve already seen: Auctionsieve’s most important feature is the “Hide Items shown before” option. It lets you hide everything you’ve already looked at. That might not sound like much at first, but it’s exactly what you need when you’re searching for all kinds of cameras every week or even every day, because then you only have to sift through 100 results instead of 10,000.

What should you check on the technical side?

Film cameras are technically very complex, and even after 7 years of handling hundreds, if not thousands, of different cameras, I still often struggle to pin down a camera’s exact technical condition. Of course, it gets even harder, or downright impossible, when all you have are shaky, blurry, dark photos of the camera (which is often what you’ll get when you’re hunting for bargains on eBay).

Naturally, we want to maximize our chances of buying a good, working camera, so we try to squeeze every bit of information we can out of the listing:

1. How trustworthy the seller is: I’ve already explained above roughly how I size up a seller. Look at how much feedback they have, especially negative and neutral feedback, and read the description (if it’s empty, that’s often just laziness and not necessarily a bad sign). Ideally, the seller has gone to a lot of trouble and checked as much as possible themselves. Pro tip: never buy anything that’s been sitting in a basement. Basements are often damp, and moisture ruins any camera.
2. Study the photos really closely:

1. Look for haze or fungus in the lens and viewfinder glass
2. Look at photos of the open back and check whether the light seals are intact (usually they aren’t, but they’re fairly easy to replace yourself, and we sell a light seal kit for exactly that)
3. Check for covers and battery doors that are missing or have snapped off
4. See whether the camera looks clean and free of major scratches and dents (that’s usually a sign it’s been handled or stored with care)

3. If you can look at the camera in person, you can of course judge its condition much better. You can, for example, put in a battery and check whether the light meter still works, work the film advance, look through the open back to see whether the shutter opens and closes, turn the aperture ring and check whether the aperture blades close reliably or are oily, and so on.

Most of the time you won’t get the chance to check the camera in person. And even if you do, that kind of technical check is hard for a non-expert to carry out. So all you can really go on is a careful look at the seller, the description and the photos, a little bit of luck and, as a last resort, of course, returning the defective camera.

Want to play it safe? Buy from a trusted source

In the end, it’s your call: do you take a gamble and buy a camera cheaply from a private seller, only for it to arrive broken? Or do you play it safe and buy from a reputable seller with good feedback and a 30-day return policy?

If you decide to go the safe route: our directory of film photography shops lists retailers and specialist mail-order dealers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, sortable by distance. It also helps you find a shop near you where you can hold a camera in your own hands before you buy it. That beats any listing description.

I hope this buying guide has helped you and that it leads you to your dream camera. If it does, you can support us by picking up the accessories you need (a battery, say, or any covers) in our shop. If you have any more questions, feel free to leave us a comment or message us on Instagram @ausgeknipst.de

All the best!

Yours, Vladi @ausgeknipst

Which camera is it going to be?

Knowing which model you’re actually after is half the battle. These buying guides do the shortlisting for you:

• Rollei 35 variants compared: which of the many versions is worth buying
• Pentax ME vs. ME Super vs. MX: a compact SLR without overpaying
• Nikon FM, FM2, FE, FE2 and FM3a: Nikon’s compact classics
• Canon F-1 vs. F-1n vs. New F-1: the three are not the same camera
• Buying a Rolleiflex: 2.8 or 3.5, Planar or Xenotar
• Beaulieu Super 8 and Canon Scoopic, if you’re after moving pictures

And once the camera has arrived and starts acting up: whether a service is even worth it is covered in Does every “broken” film camera need a CLA?, and in our overview of repair workshops you’ll find someone who can do it.