The eBay Experience !

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RobertOToole
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Re: The eBay Experience !

Post by RobertOToole »

Hi Lothar,

No, I didn't pay him........ but I'm not against paying him.

In case eBay reversed the judgement, I didn't want to lose 2X the price of the lens, I wanted to wait a few days. 2 days later he tried to buy the MB-3 so I didn't want to pay him and lose the MB-3 money.

Looks like I lose either way, if I pay him or don't pay the guy. I'm already out priority shipping cost two ways.

Best,

Robert

Dubi
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Re: The eBay Experience !

Post by Dubi »

Ebay is a mixed bag, no doubt, but for someone like me, trying to upgrade vintage microscopes, it has been a good resource for parts. There are scammers. Asking questions is a good idea (something I should do more of) as sometimes scammers can be identified pre-purchase, as in the person who refuses to answer a simple question or gives an answer than can't be correct or who responds with "I'm not going to sell to you!" My main problem, though, is simply that the seller is often a bulk junk/surplus dealer who doesn't really know whether the item being sold is defective, however it is described. That has caused me to purchase and have to return parts with defects ranging from the subtle to something as blatant as cracked internal glass. Then there are the situations where the part is probably not defective but proves not to work for the intended use--a constant risk given all the permutations of parts available for vintage scope brands. Return policies are invaluable in cases like these, and I consider those offered by the seller to be part of the bargain. I did find very unprofessional the seller who blacklisted me from his auctions after I used his advertised 30-day return policy to return an objective that did not work well with the scope's other objectives. I paid shipping both ways and it was the first time I had dealt with this dealer; but looking at his other auctions, which include a few microscopes that I doubt have the capabilities described, he is probably a scammer I am better off staying away from. I have bought several used microscopes on Ebay and have not needed to return any, so have been lucky there, knock on wood, but buying used items on Ebay is definitely a case of caveat emptor.

Lou Jost
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Re: The eBay Experience !

Post by Lou Jost »

I love eBay, I love the fact that I can still buy a Repro-Nikkor or a crazy x-ray machine lens or a beautiful medium format lens or a decades-old fluorite supertelephoto or used microscope focus block. These things are vanishingly rare anywhere else. I cannot imagine life without eBay.

I have not run into many overt scammers. To me the biggest problem with eBay is one that it shares with any other used-object marketplace. Many people sell things because they are not as good as they could or should be. So for items whose quality varies even when new (and that includes all consumer camera lenses), the ones available on eBay will be biased towards the bad end of the spectrum. Without anything to compare with the item, it is often impossible to know whether it is performing as it should.

The quality variation I have seen in eBay lenses has been extreme, on those few occasions when I have bought the same model twice. The same is true of new lenses bought from BH or others; in fact I am early certain that BH sells open-box rejects as if they were new.

My latest fiasco with BH (which I hate with a passion, their packing is criminally bad nowadays) was a $1000+ Oly 45mm Pro lens. When I got it, it looked as though someone had handled it before. This is supposed to be an excellent lens with the sharpest aperture around 2.8. My copy was sharpest at f/4-f/5.6. This was an important lens for my needs (reversed on tube lenses) so I had to buy another, this time from Samy's (to avoid BH). That one also had internal packaging that looked altered, and it tested out to be considerably worse than the first one. And this line of lenses is supposed to be Olympus' best! Panasonic is no better; I have two of their 45-175mm lenses, and one is much better than the other at long focal lengths. The one that is bad at long focal lengths is by far the best of the two at wider focal lengths. So they are both bad, but in opposite ways. Those were both bought new from reputable camera companies; imagine how bad the ones on eBay are likely to be!

Medium format lenses are also wildly variable. I bought two 105mm-210mm Mamiya zooms from eBay; one was quite good and the other was so bad I threw it away.

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Steve S
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Re: The eBay Experience !

Post by Steve S »

Lou, I agree with you that B&H very likely sells returned merchandise as new, but it has puzzled me for several decades that of the (probably literally) hundreds of items I've bought from them, I've never opened a manufacturer's box send by B&H and found any definite evidence that there had been repacking -- fingerprints, dust, torn paper or plastic, nothing like that. I do look carefully. B&H does say about returns that the item must be in resalable condition, something of a hint that they might attempt to resell it, surely. Mystifying to me. As to B&H's external packing for shipment, it's rudimentary and hopelessly inadequate, but surely by design -- one sees complaints about it regularly over the years, and it's only gotten worse.

I'm picky about lens performance and have returned a number to B&H without the slightest resistance on their part, eg, they've never ask for any evidence of a reported problem. Often when I repack an item for return I wonder if a sharp eye could not detect that my work was not factory-fresh.

I hope this is not too OT for a thread on eBay.

Lou Jost
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Re: The eBay Experience !

Post by Lou Jost »

Steve, yes, that ease of returning an item is one of the reasons I feel B&H must re-sell the rejects.

In the case I mentioned with B&H, the inner plastic bag containing the lens was unsealed and without a silica pouch.

In the case of Samy's I had more hope that they would not re-sell rejects as if they were new, because they have a whole section for "open-box" merchandise. But the lens I got from them had an unsealed dessicant-free plastic bag with conspicuous circular wear marks (perhaps from the lens front) in a place that nothing was touching. The lens must have been re-packed by someone after it had shipped originally.

I am unable to return these lenses because I typically don't retrieve them until months after delivery; I live abroad and only come to the US once or twice a year to pick up gear I have accumulated at friends' or family's houses.

I think your post is relevant, because the most common alternative to eBay is a mail-order camera store. It seems worth pointing out how hard it is to escape the risks of bad lenses.

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Steve S
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Re: The eBay Experience !

Post by Steve S »

There is no way to escape the risks of sub-par lenses. On several occasions I've ordered a newly-released lens and found it decentered/tilted, received it so soon after initial release that it is hardly possible it was a return. Lloyd Chambers has said that Leica told him that even at their prices there would be some lenses that would not pass his critical muster. Roger Cicala has written extensively about this regarding camera lenses, and of course several of the accomplished members of this forum regularly address discouraging variation in microscope objectives. Death, taxes, and decentering/tilt/mis-spacing.

Lou Jost
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Re: The eBay Experience !

Post by Lou Jost »

Steve, that is very true. Since that is the case, we need to recognize that used marketplaces are going to be highly biased towards sub-par lenses. While new ones are also often bad, used ones are far more likely to be bad, because the owner very likely found them to be sub-par. In practice, the best thing we can do is buy only from sellers who offer easy returns, and thoroughly test the lens against published test results. The easiest thing to check (if one does not have a calibrated test set-up) is the optimum aperture. If the observed optimum aperture is smaller (higher f/) than the published optimum aperture, the lens is bad.

Scarodactyl
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Re: The eBay Experience !

Post by Scarodactyl »

The upside on objectives is that they are rarely bought by individuals and more often discarded because of wasteful surplusing rather than any specific reason. Then again these lenses have a chance of being mistreated in a variety of creative ways beyond what an individual could accomplish so it's all a bit iffy.
Overall I can't complain, I've had good luck and gotten some great deals over the years, risky as it is.

Lou Jost
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Re: The eBay Experience !

Post by Lou Jost »

Me too, almost all my objectives come from there.

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