Richard Haw's Classic Nikon Repair and Review

Hello, everybody! Today, I will be covering the 9th Shinjuku Classic Camera Bazaar! This is usually held around Summer by the Association for Promotion of Camera Commerce. It is sort of like a guild of some sort with members from all around Japan. There are others but this and the I.C.S. (Import Camera Society) are the bigger ones and they both organize bazaars like this in Tokyo. For a gear nut and “tinkerbug”, these bazaars are some of the bigger highlights for the year as far as photography is concerned. I hope you can join me!

Here is a panorama from my iPhone. The participants are all members of the same guild. They have been holding this event for a couple of years now and some come from distant prefectures like Osaka and Nagoya just to participate in this bazaar. If there is a heaven for a camera collector, then it will probably look like this and everything for sale is cheap or given away for free. How nice is that? I would prefer this to the virgins in the afterlife!This is probably the most important item in the whole fair as far as Nikon is concerned. I wanted to buy this but I just cannot afford something like this. It is not other than the old Kwanon (Canon) camera and the first Nikkor ever made for consumer rangefinders. This is a good specimen and it looks clean. The black Nikon S2 to the left is also rare.

To me, the highlight of the bazaar is the junk section which is traditionally held weekend. People who are into repairing or sales of used photography equipment flock to this event and a frenzy ensues. I was waiting in line to be one of the first ones to get in and I waited for 2 hours to make sure I get there first. The people who can be aggressive and cunning in this sort of environment but being Japan, everything went on peacefully. If I am right, I was the only person who lost his temper that morning. It was understandable as the kid was in the way of everybody so an irate middle-aged person has to tell him off.

Here’s an example of one of the boxes (around 5 in all). Whenever the merchandise looks it needs refilling, a staff would just fill the box with fresh junk! Whatever you see here is overpriced but there will be times that you’ll get lucky and find something reasonable. It is also a nice idea to check what you get here because some can still be restored to decent working order while some are just fit for parts. People who come here know their thing.

For me, I just got this old Sigma lens. I had one of these around a decade ago where the lens was used with a Nikon D90 most of the time. T’was good enough for prints for use on a billboard. I am going to use this for an experiment of mine so while this can definitely still be rescued, I am going to destroy this lens for something more important. You’ll see.

It is the same year-after-year and the only changes I noticed recently are the foreigners who are coming here to buy stuff. Recently, there is an influx of mainland Chinese people and you will know them by how aggressive they haggle for the price. This is considered a rude behavior here in Japan but the shops don’t mind anyway since they buy a lot so it is tolerated to a certain extent at least for these people. There are also talks about camera and photography related stuff and this afternoon, there was a talk about Fujifilm and it’s film and digital image paradigms and philosophies. I’m not interested in this so I skipped it and just spend my time looking for something useful in the junk boxes.

I frequently go back to the bazaar just to check what’s there and yesterday, I got myself a junk Nikon F with a Photomic finder. Who knows what I’ll find there in the coming days! Wish me luck so that I can find more cheap junks for blog! My win is your win! Ric.

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