I bought a new lens from eBay, not this one, but a 50mm f/1.8. Yes, if you remember I had bought a 50mm f/1.8 back in Calgary, and even though I couldn’t use it for awhile, it wasn’t broken and everything was fine. So why did I buy another lens with the exact same specs?

Well it’s not entirely the same, this one is older and of the manual focus variety. I can still fit it on my D50, but it only works in fully manual mode; that is it doesn’t do any metering so I have to set the shutter speed and aperture by hand. So why did I buy a worse copy of a lens that I already have?

Well because it’s half the length of my AF 50mm! It’s only about 3 centimeters long, and incredibly light, so I can slip it in my pocket and carry it around with me all the time. Of course the non-AF part is a definite drawback, but I won’t be using it that often. I also got a free UV filter as part of the deal, but it’s worthless. You can actually see scratches on the filter!

For all the talk of not paying custom charges on eBay purchases, I had to pay $8 and change to get this lens. The value of it was only $20USD, but either because the value converted to Canadian currency was greater than $20, or it required signature for delivery, I had to pay duties. The dumb part was that the duty was only $3 and change; There was a $5 handling fee from customs.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: ebay, photography, techlust