Quote:
Originally Posted by gb_astro
Really surprised at what some people seem to be paying for second hand Pentax XWs here on IIS at the moment
when as per this thread most of them are available new direct form Japan for around $370 including postage, delivered within a week.
gb.
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I think it depends whether it is 'grey' versus authorised stock.
One trick to differentiating them (and I can't vouch for the reliability of this methodology) is whether the eyepiece comes with all the original packaging and in particular the Pentax paperwork.
Pentax like all factories manufacture their product in mass and have a proportion from this process which aren't 100% but still very good. For example, my father worked for a chocolate manufacturer which every week had sacks of supposed 'reject' chocolates. They tasted fine but something like the decorative circle on the top wasn't perfect or the strawberry wasn't perfectly in the middle. Whatever the case - these 'rejects' weren't thrown-away (as this would be too great a loss for the company) - they were instead sold at a much lower cost to a secondary "smaller" "non-authorised" re-seller (not one of the main retail outlets) who thereafter sold them to the public as grey stock minus the official box/warranty etc.
Whatever your viewpoint on 'grey' stock to my mind a far worse situation is the circumstance where an identical eyepiece (lets hypothetically call it 'really big field of view eyepiece') are all made on a very small island nation wherein once it has some green paint applied to it is sold for 5x more than the same thing under a not so highly marketed/hyped brand label and simply painted black.
It is the old saying 'if the deal is too good to be true then it probably isn't'. In this context folks need to critically ask themselves (avoiding wishful thinking) how can one small retail outlet drastically under-cut all the major astronomy retail outlets? Whereas these big stores are located in the UK or US there is a rough parity in their prices once conversion of the exchange rates is taken into consideration.
When you objectively answer this question the reality is that the stock is not the same thing. If you go into buying equipment accepting this situation then everything is fine. The problems arise when something isn't quite right with the equipment and then locally located dealers don't have to help you and your overseas vendor doesn't really offer genuine support from the manufacturer.
