The Online Photographer

["Open Mike" is the Editorial page of TOP, wherein Your Humble Editor stumbles though the jumble sale of his mental attic. It appears on Wednesdays.] 

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If you're a fan of classic Olympus film cameras and you've ever wanted an Olympus OM Zuiko 40mm ƒ/2 lens, I apologize.

I was personally responsible for driving the price of that lens up into...well, not the stratosphere, but to five or ten times what it should be.

I was a big fan of the lens in the 1990s and wrote an article for Photo Techniques singing its praises. The article got a lot of discussion on the then-fledgling Internet. (Remember when things used to go "viral" organically?)

Immediately afterwards, I watched the prices of the little lens go up, and up, and up. I figured it wouldn't last, though.

But it did. Year after year, the prices stayed frustratingly high.

I just checked, for the first time in a few years, and, yep...up is where that pleasant little pancake's prices have stayed.

Sorry about that.

No it's not
It's peculiar how the market gets and keeps its own prejudices. There was a certain manual-focus film-camera lens years ago that was invariably described as "rare." Humans being humans, sellers of course began adding intensifiers..."extremely rare," "incredibly rare" and so on. And that persisted.

...Despite the fact that the lens wasn't rare. A denizen of the brand's forums at the time even did a comprehensive analysis of the availability of that lens versus the marque's other optical offerings, and proved it wasn't rare. But of course that had no affect whatsoever on the market as a whole...the lens went on being described as "rare" everywhere you looked.

That was decades ago.

I just looked at five or six eBay auctions for it, though, and didn't see the word "rare" anywhere.

The funny thing is, it might actually be rare now.

Another camera that has always traded for a high price is the Minolta CLE (the letters, somewhat incongruously, meant "Compact Leica Electronic"). That camera has always been expensive. (I had nothing to do with it, so don't blame me for that one.) And to my surprise it's still expensive. I just looked at the first ten auctions for "body only" that came up when I searched "Minolta CLE" on eBay, and the average price is just under $600—for a basic little film camera introduced almost 40 years ago. Camera collector guru Stephen Gandy says, "until the introduction of the Leica M7 in 2001, the CLE remained for 21 years the most technologically advanced Leica M mount camera ever produced. Not bad, for a Minolta." (The italics are his.) Yeah, but that was then. It's certainly not more technologically advanced than an M10 now.

What was the CLE most famous for? For being the cheapest body you could use Leica M lenses on. But that advantage went away when the various M-mount Voigtländers came along.

Didn't matter, though. CLE prices still stayed high.

You'd think that digital would have dampened interest in the thing. Nope. CLE prices still stayed high.

Know what I think? I think the CLE is high-priced because it's priced high. It's always been, and it just is, and that's all there is to that.

Cheap?
Similarly, are there really so many people clamoring for a smallish normal lens for the Olympus OM film cameras that the 40mm (I found only four on eBay, average cost $562) costs fifteen times what you can get the very similar OM Zuiko 50mm ƒ/1.8 for? Due to market forces alone? Seems unlikely. It's a nice little lens, but it's not that nice.

Olympus OM-4T and OM Zuiko 40mm ƒ/2. This is a recycled
picture, making it environmentally correct.

Ironically, one of the reasons I liked that 40mm Olympus lens in the first place is that it was cheap. Olympus sent 3,000 of them to the USA and had trouble unloading them, so for eons they languished on closeout, listed in the mail-order ads in the back of Popular Photography and Shutterbug and Modern Photography for bargain-basement prices, in many cases for less than $100 brand new. Nobody wanted the oddball focal length.

That was before it finally sold out and the supply dried up. And before I came along and started talking it up.

Josh Hawkins still reads TOP. He's now an accomplished photojournalist and a family man, but when Josh was young he was the manager of Oak Park Camera in Oak Park, Illinois. I wandered in one day to find Josh pricing a box of used equipment that had just arrived at the store. As we stood there talking he extracted a minty OM Zuiko 40mm ƒ/2 out of the box, tied a pricetag to it, wrote "$55"on the pricetag, and set it on the counter with the rest of the priced items waiting to be shelved.

I stared at that lens. For several years I had been on high alert looking for used Zuiko 40mm bargains, and had found several, and here was another one staring me in the face. I almost had to buy it just on pure reflex.

But I had just left Olympus behind for a Leica at that point, so, while tempted, I decided, no, it would be stupid to buy another one of those lenses when I had just offloaded the three I had already owned. (By the way, I had bought each of my three, used, for less than $100 each.)

Having nothing personally at stake, I fired up the ol' blabbermouth. I told Josh I'd written an article about the lens and that ever since, the prices for it had been skyrocketing, in some cases reaching the $400 range and even more. I was laughing about how silly it was.

Josh didn't say a word. He just leaned over, added another zero to the price, and calmly resumed his work.

I remember standing there staring at that little Zuiko with its $550 price tag thinking: hmm, a second ago I could have afforded that. But not any more.

Mike

P.S. The best used film-camera bargain on eBay right now is...I ain't telling!

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Richard Man: "Mike, we all know the worst incident that you are responsible for. You can't hide from it: a certain other Leica lens is more expensive even though it's no better than its siblings. Time to 'fess up again, Mr. Bokeh King."

Chris: "Are you really saying that you are solely responsible for the high price of the 40mm Olympus? This sounds rather Trumpian, I have to say."

Mike replies: I absolutely am saying that, and I believe it's true, and please don't insult me.  :-)

Daniel: "Kirk Tuck wrote a few online articles about his love for the Nikon D700 and now you can't get a really good deal on them. Price in the marketplace suddenly jumped a few hundred dollars. Keep quiet, guys."

Geoff B.: "My memory fails me: was it you who also talked up the Leica 35mm ƒ/2 series IV, the so-called 'King of Bokeh'? I bought one second-hand about 25 years ago for what I vaguely recall was a reasonable price. I still have it and it is my favourite lens, chiefly for its size and focal length, but have never really seen why it should be any better than my other lenses. I’ve just checked on eBay UK and find that it has an asking price of more than £3,000 which is many times what I paid and nearly twice what its aspherical successor goes for. It is probably wasted on me as I don’t really see the attraction of out-of-focus areas for the kind of photography that I do."

Mike replies: Guilty. That was in a caption to our articles about bokeh in 1997. The picture was mine (as I recall) and as the editor I wrote that caption. I wish I could have elaborated: the IV's bokeh is very tight and coherent a few stops down and at middle focus distances and farther, but wider open and up closer it's not so good. No one lens has consistent bokeh characteristics. A lens can even show different flavors of bokeh in the same picture!

And you know why I got rid of that lens? On mine, the black coating on the aperture blades kept flaking off and collecting in the optical path. I had it cleaned once and when it happened again I knew it was going to drive me crazy so I sold the lens. I've owned hundreds of lenses and I've never had that happen before or since.

Clyde: "I have an OM-1n, with goatskin leather and a 2-4 viewing screen, mounted with the 40mm ƒ/2. You just reminded me so I went and found it on the shelf. It is pure joy to pick up and use! The brightness, field of of view, ease of focus...so sweet. How many cameras of any era feel like you've just pulled a big screen TV up to your eye and are easy to use in low light? I've owned most of the other OMs and many of their best lenses, like the 50mm ƒ/1.2; most are gone now. This particular combo I will never sell. It's magic, even without ever seeing your article. But thank you for keeping the value high."