Buying a used film camera: where to look, what to check, what to pay

Almost every film camera you can buy today is at least thirty years old. That’s the heart of the matter, and no seller can change it, not the dealer offering a warranty and not the flea market stall asking twenty euros. The only question you need to answer is this: who carries the risk that something’s broken, and what is that worth to you?

Almost every one, because for a few years now there have been exceptions again. You can buy new, with a warranty, the Pentax 17 (half-frame, built like a proper camera), the Lomo MC-A, the Rollei 35AF with autofocus in the classic body and the Kodak Snapic A1, among others. Then there are the simple Lomography cameras, which above all deliver one thing for little money: the fun of trying things out. New costs more than used, but it comes without the questions this guide is about. If you don’t want any uncertainty at all, that’s your way out; for everyone else, from here on it’s all about the used market.

This guide walks through the six ways to get hold of a used camera and shows what to watch for with each: how to read a listing, what you can check on the camera in ten minutes, how to tell whether a price is fair, and which faults you can live with and which turn the camera into a paperweight.

Don’t want to read, just want the addresses? Here’s the list; the rest of the guide helps you choose.

Our shop directory puts every analog photo shop in Germany, Austria and Switzerland on one map: 91 shops and specialist mail-order retailers with a genuine analog range. Search by postcode to find the one nearest you, or filter by what you need, such as used cameras, film, accessories or darkroom supplies.

Contents

1. Six ways to buy a used camera
2. Who carries the risk: dealer or private seller?
3. What the photos show and what the wording really means
4. The ten-minute hands-on check
5. What counts as a fair price
6. Which faults you can live with, and which you can’t
7. How to spot a good film camera shop
8. If your new camera won’t work, it’s often the battery
9. Local shop or specialist mail-order dealer?
10. And after that: film, developing, repairs

Six ways to buy a used camera

Photo: Sandor Somkuti, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

The options differ less in price than in how much peace of mind you get with your purchase. From the most expensive and safest to the cheapest and riskiest:

A local specialist dealer is the only option where you’ve held the camera in your hands before buying it and still have someone to ask afterwards. Many shops service their used cameras before selling them: measuring shutter speeds, replacing light seals, cleaning the viewfinder. They also back them with their own warranty. You pay a premium for that, roughly one and a half times what a private seller would charge.

Specialist mail-order dealers in used cameras work on the same principle, just without the shop counter. They grade condition on their own scales and note what they’ve checked. The upside is choice: if you’re after a particular model in a particular condition, you’re more likely to find it there than at the shop around the corner. The downside is that you still have to rely on the description.

eBay is the biggest marketplace, and the one where quality varies the most. A dealer-serviced camera sits right next to an attic find sold as “untested”. How to avoid getting burned (reading listings, sizing up sellers, tracking prices, bidding smartly) is covered in detail in our guide Buying a film camera on eBay. This article sticks to the big picture.

Local classifieds have the advantage that you can often go and look at the camera before any money changes hands. And that’s exactly what you should do. Prices are lower than anywhere else, there’s no right of return, and the description usually comes from someone who inherited the camera and never used it.

Flea markets are the cheapest option and the only one where you can really press, turn and listen before you buy. In return, you buy as seen, with no safety net at all. That makes them the wrong place for your first purchase, but a very good one for your fourth, once you can do the ten-minute check in your sleep.

Estate sales and house clearances are where the lucky finds turn up: cameras that sat in a cupboard for decades, often with their original accessories, often going for far less than they’re worth. At the same time, they’re in the worst shape storage can leave a camera in: gummed-up mechanics, crumbling light seals, leaked batteries in the compartment. Expect it to need a full service, and factor that into the price.

First camera from a dealer, third one from a flea market. When you buy your first, you can’t tell whether something’s broken, and if your first roll comes back blank from the lab, you won’t know whether it was the camera or you. A camera a dealer has checked takes exactly that uncertainty out of the equation. The extra you pay saves you learning the lesson the hard way.

Who carries the risk: dealer or private seller?

Photo: VSchagow, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Buying privately, whether through classifieds, at a flea market or from an estate, is a lot cheaper. In return, you buy as seen: no returns, no warranty, and the earliest you’ll know whether the shutter works at every speed is when your first roll comes back developed. That’s no reason to avoid it; you just need to know what you’re getting into.

At a dealer, you pay the premium and get checked equipment, a warranty and, as a rule, the right to return it. If you can’t judge the technical condition yourself, that extra cost is almost always the best thing you can spend the money on.

Here’s how the numbers honestly stack up: an overhauled camera from a dealer costs perhaps one and a half times the private price. A full service from a camera repair technician costs many times that, and simply isn’t worth it for most everyday cameras. So if you buy privately and get unlucky, you’re not looking at a repair, you’re looking at buying a second camera.

Seven years of buying used, in one video: what we look out for ourselves before we bid.

What the photos show and what the wording means

This Nikkormat cost three euros at a flea market: dents, scratches and a smell of cigarettes, but the mechanics worked. Cameras like this are exactly why it pays to know how to read a listing. Photo: stammi, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Whenever you buy a camera you haven’t held in your hands, the listing is all you’ve got. Two things help: look closely at the photos and take the wording seriously.

What the photos give away. A seller who photographs the camera with the back open has nothing to hide, and you get to see the light seals, the film channel and the shutter curtain. If that shot is missing from a listing with twenty other photos, that’s no accident. Also look out for haze or specks in the viewfinder (fungus in the lens), greenish crust in the battery compartment (a leaked cell, often with knock-on damage to the contacts), a front element that looks like frosted glass in raking light, and dents on the edges of the body, since a drop rarely damages just the paint.

What the wording means. A handful of stock phrases have become standard on the used market, and most of them boil down to the same thing: the seller hasn’t tried the camera. That’s perfectly fine, as long as you factor it into the price. The most common phrases and what they mean in practice:

The real takeaway isn’t the table, it’s the pattern: a seller who spells out exactly what they did and didn’t check is more reliable than one who just writes “all perfect”. How precise a listing is correlates surprisingly well with how carefully the camera has been looked after.

Two questions that filter any listing: Message the seller: “Could you send a photo of the open back and the battery compartment?” and “Does the slowest shutter speed sound noticeably longer than the fastest?” Anyone who answers both has actually had the camera in their hands. Anyone who dodges the questions has saved you a disappointment. Either way, it costs you two minutes.

The ten-minute hands-on check

Photo: Bella M Broome, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Once you get the camera in your hands, whether in a shop, at a flea market or at the seller’s home, ten minutes will tell you most of what you need to know. No tools, no film, no expertise required. Work through it in this order:

Listen to the shutter speeds. Fire the shutter once at every speed, from the slowest to the fastest. You should be able to hear the slow speeds: one second should sound like a second, half a second like half a second. If 1/1000 sounds just like 1/125, something’s wrong. If the shutter hangs open on the slow speeds, the gear train has gummed up, which is the most common finding in cameras that have spent years in storage.

Film advance and frame counter. Wind on, fire, wind again. The lever should travel smoothly through its full stroke and lock in place, and the frame counter should count along. An advance that slips or catches is a real problem, because it decides whether the film actually moves forward at all.

Viewfinder and mirror. Point the camera at a bright surface. Dust in the viewfinder is normal and doesn’t matter. Fogging, a milky haze or flaking mirror silvering, on the other hand, do matter. When you fire the shutter, the mirror has to flip up and drop straight back down; if it stays stuck in the up position, the mechanism’s lubrication has given out.

Lens aperture. Turn the aperture ring through its whole range and watch the blades as you do. They should be dry and move quickly. Shiny, oily spots on the blades mean lubricant has migrated; the aperture then closes with a delay or not at all, and that ruins your exposures more reliably than any shutter fault.

Open the back. Look at the light seals: the black foam strips in the grooves. If they’re sticky, crumbly or already gone, you’ll get light leaks on your film. It’s the most common fault of all and at the same time the most harmless one; more on that below. Check the film channel too: any scratches there will end up on every negative.

Battery compartment last. Open the cover and look at the contacts. A greenish or white crust means a cell has leaked. Surface deposits can be cleaned off; if the corrosion has crept into the wiring, it’s a repair job. On cameras with a fully mechanical shutter that’s annoying but something you can live with: you only lose the light meter.

The same check on video, demonstrated step by step on an actual camera. Video: 64 ASA.

The check is no substitute for measuring: Ten minutes will weed out the obvious cases, such as a sticking shutter, a dead film advance or oily aperture blades. Whether 1/125 really is 1/125 is something you can’t hear; for that you need a shutter tester or a test roll. So even if a camera passes the check, expect it to be slightly off. Negative film will forgive that, slide film won’t.

What counts as a fair price

There’s no price guide for film cameras, and any you find online is already out of date by the time you read it: the market has been heading upward for years, and for some models in sudden jumps. So what works isn’t a table but a method.

Look at sold listings, not live ones. What someone is asking tells you nothing. What someone actually paid tells you everything. On eBay you can narrow your search to completed auctions that actually sold; ten results will give you a reliable range. Skip this step and you’ll regularly pay a third too much.

Only compare like with like. “Nikon FM2” on its own tells you nothing about price. An overhauled FM2 from a dealer with a warranty, a working one from a private seller and an untested one from an estate are three different products. When you work out a price range, keep it within one condition grade.

Price the lens separately. In many listings the value is in the glass, not the body. A body with a sought-after fast lens can cost less than the lens on its own, and conversely, for a kit with a mediocre zoom you’ll often pay the price of the body with nothing extra for the zoom.

Subtract the costs you can see coming. New light seals cost pocket change; an overhaul costs several times what an everyday camera is worth. If a listing says “untested”, the fair price isn’t the market price but the market price minus what it will realistically cost to get the camera back in working order. Whether servicing is worth it at all is discussed in our article Does every “broken” film camera need a CLA?

And one observation from our customer support that no price comparison will show you: the most expensive purchases are rarely the overpriced ones, but the cheap ones that had to be made twice.

Which faults you can live with and which you can’t

No thirty-year-old camera is flawless. What matters is which flaws are cosmetic, which are cheap to fix and which spell the end of the camera.

You can live with these. Scratches, dents and worn paint make no difference to the picture. Dust in the viewfinder bothers you when you look through it, not on the film. A worn edge on the leatherette is par for the course. And on a mechanical camera, a dead light meter isn’t a dealbreaker: the classic sunny-day exposure rule or a phone app will fully replace it while you’re starting out.

These are cheap to fix, and you can do it yourself. Here’s the most useful practical lesson in this whole guide. When a camera you’ve bought won’t work, in the vast majority of cases it comes down to exactly two things: crumbling light seals and an oxidized battery compartment. Both sound like a job for a repair shop, and neither is. If all you want is a camera you can go out and shoot with, you don’t need a CLA or a camera technician, just half an hour and two simple fixes.

The two fixes that save most “broken” cameras: Clean the oxidation out of the battery compartment. The contacts are almost always tarnished, often from a cell that has leaked. Take a small screwdriver and carefully roughen the contact surfaces; the point is to break up the oxide layer mechanically, not to remove material. Then wipe them down with isopropyl alcohol, or better still with contact cleaner if you have some at home. In most cases the light meter will read again afterwards. Only if the corrosion has crept into the wiring does it become a repair job. Light seals, and the all-clear. You don’t have to replace them straight away. Load a roll and see whether any light leaks show up at all; often the foam is crumbly but still seals. Only once you see light leaks on the developed film is it worth replacing them, and that’s an afternoon project, not a job for the repair shop. You’ll find it explained step by step in our guide Replacing light seals.

Missing caps, straps and small parts are a matter of tracking them down anyway, not faults. So, all in all: a camera listed as “untested” whose battery compartment has a green shimmer in the photo isn’t a reason to walk away; it’s a bargaining chip.

This is where it gets expensive, or terminal. A shutter curtain with holes or tears, gummed-up mechanics that no longer run cleanly at any speed, a film advance that slips, fungus in the lens with visibly etched glass, corroded electronics in a camera that does nothing at all without power. Any one of these will cost more at a camera technician’s than a working example of the same model, and with fully electronic models the repair often founders on top of that because the spare parts are no longer available.

This leads to a simple rule for buying used: purely mechanical cameras forgive age and storage; electronic ones don’t. If you’re torn between two models and reliability matters more to you than convenience, go for the mechanical one.

The test roll is the real sign-off, not the purchase: Before you take a freshly bought camera on a trip, run a cheap roll through it, deliberately using different shutter speeds and apertures, with a few shots against bright surfaces. Light streaks show that the grooves around the back aren’t light-tight, negatives that are evenly too dark point to incorrect exposure, and blurry shots at fast speeds to a sluggish shutter. A roll that costs a few euros saves you from losing two weeks of photos that nobody can ever take again.

How to spot a good analog camera shop

Photo: sludgegulper, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Not every shop with a few cameras on the shelf is an analog shop. Here’s what separates the serious ones from those who just sell it on the side:

• The used cameras come with descriptions. “Shutter checked,” “light seals replaced,” “meter working”: only someone who actually did the work writes that down.
• The film is kept cold. A fridge behind the counter is the clearest sign that someone knows what they’re selling.
• They stock the small stuff. Batteries, straps, lens caps, film canisters. There’s hardly any margin in it, so you’ll only find it where someone genuinely wants to look after their customers.
• Someone asks you questions. “So what do you want to shoot with it?” is the most important question in the shop, and the one nobody at the electronics store ever asks.

Ten things that matter in the shop: mechanics, shutter speeds, mirror, batteries. Video: expiredFilm.

One thing that isn’t a sign of quality, by the way: size. Some of the best shops in the German-speaking countries are one-person businesses with a website that looks like it was built just after the turn of the millennium.

And when you’re standing in the shop, these are the three questions that will save you trouble: “Has the camera been checked, and for what?” A reputable dealer will tell you what they tested and what they didn’t. “Can I return it, and for how long?” That decides whether you can get your test roll developed before the return period runs out. And “Which battery does it take, and can you still get it?” The most underrated question of all. The next section explains why.

If your new camera won’t work, it’s often the battery

Photo: Anthony DeRobertis, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

It’s the classic case in our customer support: the camera is written off as broken, but it isn’t. It simply doesn’t have the right power source.

Many cameras from the 1960s and ’70s were designed for mercury button cells: PX625, PX13, PX27 and their relatives. These have been banned for decades and are no longer made. Put in the wrong replacement cell today and you’ll either get no reading at all or, far more treacherous, a wrong one: the mercury cell delivered a steady 1.35 volts, while the usual alkaline replacements deliver 1.5 volts and drop off as they drain. The meter will show something, just not the right thing, and you won’t notice until the film is developed.

That’s why this question belongs in the shop, not at home afterwards. A good dealer knows which cell the model needs and whether there’s a solution for it: for many cameras it ends up being a hearing aid battery with an adapter ring, for others a silver oxide cell with adjusted exposure will do. If you’d like to look it up yourself beforehand, you can type your model into our battery finder. We make adapters like these ourselves, so we do have a stake in it, but the answer there is still useful even if you end up buying elsewhere.

The wrong replacement battery gives you a reading, just not the right one: That’s the catch. A camera running on a 1.5-volt alkaline cell instead of the old 1.35-volt mercury cell seems to work fine. The pointer moves, the needle swings. But it exposes wrongly, in extreme cases by a full stop, and you won’t see that until the film is developed. That’s why a dead light meter is more honest than one fed the wrong voltage.

Local shop or mail-order specialist?

Enter your postcode, pick a radius, filter by what they stock: that’s how searching our shop directory works.

Both are in our list, and both have their place.

What the local shop has going for it is everything that can’t come in a parcel: picking up a camera, checking the viewfinder, listening to the shutter. With used cameras, nothing replaces that; no photo will show you whether the film advance catches. On top of that you get advice, and if something goes wrong, someone to talk to who’ll still be there tomorrow.

What the mail-order specialist has going for it is choice. If you’re after a particular model or need an unusual format, there’s hardly any way around the mail-order specialists; no shop keeps all of that in stock.

So the practical answer is rarely either/or: cameras and advice locally, the more unusual things from a mail-order specialist. In the shop directory you can filter for each separately.

And then: film, developing, repairs

Photo: Skynet1959, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

The camera is only the first link in the chain. We’ve pulled together what comes after it as well:

• Which film to buy: the four families of film, what ISO and the numbers on the box mean, what film costs, and why the development process decides who can develop it for you.
• Film labs in German-speaking countries: over 100 labs with their processes, mail-in or drop-off, and prices where available. Which one suits your film is covered in the guide Finding the right photo lab.
• Repair shops worldwide, in case your camera acts up after all.

And if you’re still deciding which model to go for: a good, brand-neutral starting point is the video Die besten analogen Kameras für Einsteiger (“The best analog cameras for beginners”) by Phepper. We’ve also written detailed comparisons of some of the classics ourselves, such as the Rollei 35, the compact Pentax models, Nikon’s FM and FE series and the Rolleiflex.

Further reading from the community

We’re not the only source, and for some things there are better ones. Here’s where we look ourselves when a question goes beyond our own range:

• 35mmc, an English-language community blog with hands-on write-ups of practically every 35mm camera ever made. Written by people who actually use the cameras, not by editorial teams.
• APHOG forum, the German-language meeting place for serious analog photography. If you’re looking for something on a rare model or a shop tip in the German-speaking countries, chances are it’s there.
• Photrio, the big international forum, especially strong on darkroom work, chemistry and large format.
• r/AnalogCommunity, quick and easygoing for “is this normal?” questions. A photo of the problem is usually all it takes.
• Camera-wiki, the go-to reference for model data: production years, variants, technical specs. Handy when a listing names a model you’ve never heard of.
• On YouTube: 64 ASA and expiredFilm explain buying used cameras in German, with no sales agenda. Both videos are embedded above.

And the other way round: if you know a shop that’s missing from our directory, the comments section at the bottom of the page is the quickest way to tell us. No sign-up needed.

One last request

The shop directory is the product of research, not revelation. We worked our way through websites, legal notices and directories, and we’re bound to have missed exactly the small, owner-run shops without much of an online presence, which are often the best ones.

If you know one that’s missing, there’s a comments section at the bottom of the shop directory, no sign-up needed. The same goes for corrections: shops that have closed, outdated addresses, the wrong product range. And if you’ve had a good or bad experience with a shop, a review helps everyone who comes looking after you.

Listings are free and will stay free. There are no paid placements.