With a suggested retail price of £19,800 (currently about $32,000) and only 500 units in existence, Leica’s limited edition M9 Titanium probably isn’t a camera you’re ever going to lay eyes on in real life. When it was announced back in September of last year, we predicted that most of them wouldn’t see the light of day and would be placed immediately into collectors’ vaults. Luckily for us, someone decided to actually unbox (gasp!) one of these babies (camera #164), allowing us to see what it’s like to receive such an absurdly expensive camera. Read more…
Apparently this is what Pentax considers “legendary collaboration”: a Korejanai robot edition (Korejanairobomoderu) of the K-r DSLR. It doesn’t boast any spec upgrades from the stock version, but instead sports a wacky primary color paint job and a robot head attached to the hotshoe. You’ll also get a matching special edition 35mm ƒ/2.4 prime lens to complete the horrifying awesome look. If only these were working DSLR cameras that also transformed into robot action figures.
Only 100 will be sold at a price of ¥99,800 (~$1,190), and pre-orders start at midnight on December 24, 2010.
The Canon 1200mm f/5.6 L lens is a legendary optic that B&H calls “The Mother of all Telephotos“. It’s a 36 pound behemoth that costs $120,000 if you can find one for sale — only a handful of them were made at a rate of 2 per year (delivery time was 18 months). When coupled with a crop factor body (e.g. the Canon 7D) and a 2x extender, the lens is the equivalent of a 3840mm f/11. In the above video, Bryan Carnathan of The Digital Picture gives us a glimpse of the lens in action.
Randomly came across this camera today on Wikipedia in the article on Stasi, the secret police of East Germany. Apparently it’s a “quiet” camera that was able to capture photographs through 1mm holes in walls. Now that’s a pinhole camera.
If you see anyone carrying this thing around, be very alarmed.
Forget the uber-rare Leica MP2 that’s going on auction at the end of this year. If you want a unique camera but don’t want to trade your house for it, you can save yourself a couple hundred grand by going for this brand new made-for-NASA Hasselblad MKWE up for sale on eBay for a cool $33,751.
We’re not sure why the price is so specific or what exactly makes this a NASA camera (it doesn’t seem to be branded so), but it’s a definitely an eye-catching Hassy. Read more…
This Leica MP2 camera and matching Wetzlar electric motor are going up for auction at WestLicht Auction in December of this year. The starting price for this auction is €80,000 (~$105,000), and the camera is expected to fetch up to €180,000 (~$235,440).
The reason this camera is so darn valuable is because while Leica MP2s are already quite rare, only six of them were ever made in black. This is one of them — the first to ever be offered for sale, and in fully original condition. Welcome to the crazy wonderful world of Leica collecting.
Do you think photographers in the future (assuming they exist) will be collecting any cameras being made during our time?
Most of the time we come across an absurdly large and expensive lens on eBay, it’s some sort of lens with focal lengths in the thousands of millimeters (e.g. this 5200mm Canon lens or this 2000mm Nikon lens).
The lens shown above is the Kilfitt Zoomatar 250mm f/1.3 and is currently for sale on eBay. It doesn’t have an absurdly large focal length, but is pretty standard at 250mm. See the little box handing off the end of the lens? That’s the Hasselblad medium format camera this lens is designed for.
The price? A cool $33,751. Needless to say, walking around doing street photography with this lens would earn you some pretty strange looks.
We featured a Nikon belt buckle here last month, and now here’s one by Canon. It’s a limited edition Canon F-1 belt buckle made by Lewis Buckles in Chicago for Canon in the 1970s. Charles Eves won the one above for $3 in an eBay auction. The seller was a former Canon salesman that was awarded the belt buckle for his high sales.
I wonder what Canon is awarding their employees nowadays…
Thanks for the tip, Lloyd!
Image credit: Photograph by Charles Eves and used with permission
There’s a super rare Nikkor 6mm f/2.8 fisheye lens for sale on eBay. How much does f/2.8, 6mm, and a 220° field of view cost? A mere $34,020.
Aside from this uber-rare lens being uber-expensive, it’s also ridiculously heavy, weighing in at close to 11.5 pounds. Here’s what Photography in Malaysia has to say about this lens:
You are looking at one of the most gorgeous looking lens in 35mm SLR photography – a lens that can actually see behind itself! This series of lenses were originally developed for special scientific and industrial use where wider-than-180° picture coverage is required in surveillance work, photographing the interiors of pipes, boilers, conduits, cylinder bores and other constricted areas. But in applications such as advertising and commercial photography they are used extensively for dramatic effects.
To put the field of view in perspective, human vision is about 180°.
This is the longest reaching and the largest dimension Nikkor optical lens for 35mm photography [...] This rarely seen lens was believed to be hand made and on a special order basis. It was generally been seen finished in white colour which carries the purpose of minimizing thermal effect if use frequently in the field [...] Neither the lens is easy to carry along nor friendly to handle as its dimension and weight factor often require time consuming setup for shooting.
The thing isn’t “easy to carry” because it weighs about 39 pounds. It’s also fixed at f/11, so you’ll need good light and stabilization to use it effectively.
