The last camera I bought was the Lumix FX10 I’m now using for my One Month One Camera project this month.
I bought it based on my previous very favourable experiences with Lumix cameras (LX3 and GF1 especially) and because it was dead cheap (£4) and right in what has become my sweet spot for digital cameras – those having CCD sensors between 6 and 10MP.
How about you? What was the last camera you bought? What leads you to buying a camera generally, what influences your decision to buy one over another?
Please let us know in the comments below (and don’t forget to tick the “Notify me of new comments via email” box to follow the conversation).
Thanks for looking.
What Next?
Share this post with someone you think will enjoy it using the buttons below.
Read a random post from the archives.
See what I’m up to About Now.
35hunter 
My last purchase was months ago, and it was a film camera. I bought a “Sears” TLS, which I think is a Ricoh Singlex, mostly for the lens, a 50/1.7. It was very cheap, I think I was the only bidder, and I wasn’t expecting much. The photos in the description were not very good, so it was a real crap shoot. To my surprise it appeared almost unused and seems to function well. It strikes me as a Nikkormat that takes M42 lenses. I haven’t put film in it yet, but the lens is very sharp and silky smooth. The 28/2.8 seems less successful. I have always been curious about these 50mm f/1.7 lenses, I read somewhere that they were all made by one factory in Japan.
Jon, which lens is it? An M42 Ricoh 50/1.7?
Dan, they both are branded “Sears” but I’m pretty sure they are Ricoh lenses. I also have the 50/1.4 “Sears” I picked up years ago which is very nice but is shockingly heavy and bulky.
Well whatever it says on the front, as long as it delivers for you, enjoy!
Hi, this is a really very inspiring site. Thank you very much.
I am currently traveling with a Fujifilm X10 from 2011. Here is a picture that I made her today.
More:
https://www.linsen-suppe.de/blog/eiskristalle-es-glitzert-schon-schön
Thanks Mario. Always good to hear of someone else using an older camera, and not caught up in that “Upgrade Parade” and feeling the need for the newest model every year!
I don’t buy nearly as much gear as you, I think 🙂 My wife likes to fancy herself a bit of a minimalist, while I like to gather things. I think having 3 DSLRs and my sons having two point and shoots between them, is probably enough…
The last camera I bought, other than a point and shoot for my younger son, I think was the K10D, and that was almost 3 years ago… I received a K-50 as a freebie since then, but that is another story (the camera had issues that caused the owner to not want it anymore, but in my hands the electronic issues he described have been quite rare…)
As for what makes me buy a camera… I prefer DSLRs for the image quality and because I quite like the lenses I have… haven’t bought a point in shoot in a while.
Well, I don’t buy much gear anymore! Believe it or not, I see myself as quite minimalist too, I don’t have tons of clothes or shoes or books or anything really, and these days only about a dozen cameras.
I tend to oscillate between point and shoots and DLSRs and that reminds me I have two posts in draft form called why I prefer a DSLR to a compact and vice versa!
Now I can tell my wife I have a friend who considers himself a minimalist and only has 12 cameras 😀 Let’s see if she lets me get a way with a half dozen more cameras… probably not…
I like the idea of point and shoots but haven’t really used them in a while. The last one I used was a Pentax MZ18 and I actually liked it quite a bit. The CCD sensor in that camera is a bit overworked at 16MP but the black and white files I get form it are gorgeous – and I’m not even a black and white person usually! Much superior to the later Pentax VS20, which was the swansong in Pentax point and shoots I think.
My son still has the RZ18, he broke the screen but other than that it still works fine. I need to take it back from him and start using it – he hasn’t used it since the screen broke…
I also love the look of the Kodak V1073 that someone was talking about in another thread… those Kodak sensors give absolutely gorgeous files! It also made me look at the Olympus E-500 DSLR from 2005 – gorgeous files indeed, but the problem there is that I don’t really like any of the lenses available for it. And all the Kodak V1073 cameras I can find are broken – it doesn’t seem like it was a camera made to last at all, unlike all the Pentax ones which are usually built like tanks.
And of course there’s the ultimate dream camera for me, the 645D… medium format Kodak CCD sensor. It’s what my dreams are made of…
Ha, yes I know that cameras are my weakness on the minimalist front. At one point I had about 60 so this is pretty streamlined for me now.
Don’t encourage me by recommending any more cameras!
I can’t find a Pentax MZ18, did you mean to write RZ18 here too? The one looks interesting, and very high MP for a CCD sensor, most of them seemed to peak around 10MP.
Is that Olympus E-500 micro four thirds? Or a different mount?
Marc here often talks about his Kodaks –
https://marcbeebe.wordpress.com/the-cameras-i-use/
How distant a dream is the 645D, is it fortunes?
Hey Dan,
Yes I had meant the RZ18.
The Olympus E-500 is in the dead four thirds DSLR system that existed up until around 2013. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Olympus_DSLR_cameras
The E-500 is, from what I can tell, the last of the CCD four third cameras, therefore highly appealing to me 🙂 But as I said, I was a bit disappointed at the lens offerings, and the size of the cameras is not that small, except for the E-300 with its highly unusual Porro optical prism (no prism hump!)
The 645D is a medium format camera – so though it’s cheap for a medium format camera these days, it will still cost around 2 thousand dollars with a good lens like the 55mm f/2.8 lens (which gives a 43mm equivalent – perfect walkaround for me). The 45mm lens in the 645 system is actually pretty affordable and is a 35mm equivalent.
Recently I found out about the Pentax Optio S12… the only larger sensor compact they did (1/1.7″ CCD sensor, about the same as the Ricoh GRD and the LX3/LX5) – and a lens that starts at 38mm equivalent and f/2.8. I might need to pick one up to play with it…
Chris I wish you stop name dropping such interesting cameras, I’m trying to stay away from eBay!