The Agony of Buying a 40-year old Camera on Ebay

So many choices, so many ways to be disappointed, so many risks.

I couldn’t focus on anything but cameras today. Cameras and film scanners. Then I started lurking around Ebay. I’m a camera addict, and Ebay is my dealer.

Despite my trepidation about buying a used camera on Ebay, I’ve bought three working cameras in the last 7 years — a big Polaroid camera for which film is no longer made, a Nikon F3, and an 80-year old Rolleiflex, which works like a charm. Now I want a little Rollei 35 to carry with me while I’m out and about. I have other cameras, but they’re alarmingly huge and conspicuous and I want to be discrete as a mouse, just going here and there without being given away by a foot-long lens sticking out from my jacket.