The "A" Team

Back in the old (I mean when I was a kid) days, "The A Team" was a highly successful TV show with George Peppard, Dirk Benedict and Mr. T. The show was about a band of "elite" services solders who had been wrongfully convicted of some crime and were now fugitives. This modern day band of Robin Hood wandered about helping people and trying to clear their name typically just one step ahead of "the law" trying to capture them. At the center of the mayhem was the ever present "plan". In fact, arguably, the most famous part of the show would be when toward the end of every episode, after a number of unexpected twists had occurred, but the goal had ultimately been accomplished, Col. John "Hannibal" Smith (George Peppard) would, take the cigar out of his mouth, grin and say: "I love it when a plan comes together"!
Yes, I know there's been a remake, but I'm a cranky old guy, so I'm going with the original....OK!?!

The part the pertains to me is of course the "unplanned" aspects of the situation which add drama, yet ultimately don't get in the way of the plan coming together. What that relates to of course is my previous post about "falling off the wagon" and picking up a Nikon D70s and 18-70mm lens that I had been coveting as an everyday shooter. Of course that was different from the "plastic-fantastic" (Nikon D50) that I wanted as my back-up camera/street-shooter/adverse conditions body.

So, here's what I have or have ended up with to fulfill my plan. A functioning Nikon D70s body (since I'm keeping the lens it came with). These are typically worth in the $150, give or take $25 either way. Cameras, especially in the lower-end/entry-level of the market tend to be worth more when packaged with a lens and ready to take pictures. So, a $125-150 body, plus a $25-35 lens with worth more than the sum of it's $150-185 total. A complete rig generally sells in the $250-300 price range. I know, crazy, right....why can't people just buy their own lens, put it on the camera and save the money? You have to remember the psychology of the buyer in this category. In all likelihood, they are new to either the digital end of the hobby or more typically, not certain they want to invest in the time and energy it takes to master a DSLR. These are intimidating pieces of equipment and to ask one of these folks to go out, research an appropriate lens, and purchase it to go on a body is usually a little too much. They'd much rather pay a $50-75 premium to buy it all put together.

Which brings me back to my situation. I have a camera body that I don't really want, but since I'm keeping the lens, I need a replacement for that. I have $150 invested in it. Going back to the early days of auto-focus, when it began to appear on 35mm film cameras, manufacturers made "kit" lens (both "original equipment" and "after-market") to go on them. This was after the "normal-zoom" revolution when the fixed 50mm "normal" lenses were replaced by either lenses ranging from 35-70mm to 28-80mm. On top of that, most people are unaware that the vast majority of them can be used just fine on modern DSLRs. This is thanks largely to marketing hype of everybody putting the word "digital" on the newer products to convince consumers to purchase the newer models. You add that to the confusion created by the smaller (DX/APS-C) used on most DSLRs; it creates a situation where there are hundreds of these perfectly useable older lenses for sale on eBay at ridiculously low prices. Which explains me picking up a Tamron 28-80mm/f3.5-5.6 for $27.

So, now I'm up to $177 invested. It needed a lens cap, a strap (which I have) and a charger. So I picked up generics of each last week adding $10, making the total now $187. The fact is that I'm a 100% certain that I can get at least that much from selling it locally as a "ready to shoot" package. A more likely price-point would actually be $225, even after discounting for the "hot pixel". So, ultimately, I'll end up not only getting the 18-70mm lens for "free", but making a little profit on the whole she-bang. That'll keep me on track to pick up the D50, "Plastic-Fantastic" at some point in the future.