Monthly Update, October 2026
Well I’ve been getting progressively worse at sending out these updates, but at least I have the excuse of having been very busy the past month!
New Stock
- I have a big job lot of digital compacts to work through and test. These will be appearing for sale over the next few weeks. When I say big, there’s about 50 of them!
- I have another good Mamiya 645 with waist level finder. Kit lens needs servicing but will be available soon for £350 as a kit.
- I’ve been picking up quite a lot of OM bodies lately, and I’m working through servicing them. A few nice lenses appearing too.
- I’ve got a good Canon 5D mk I. This was my dream camera in university and I did finally get one for myself too. A classic DSLR! £90
- Rolleiflex 3.5F Xenotar. Extremely nice copy, waiting to be serviced by me. Probably the nicest condition one I’ve seen personally. Price to be determined after servicing.
Stall updates
Some totally willing volunteers are helping me move the entire stall around this weekend, which will hopefully make it much easier to browse all the gear and I won’t get trapped behind the desk any more. Also gives me a bigger space for repairs where people won’t stick stuff on top of my ordered screws (hopefully).
I am also building my own point-of-sale system in order to allow me to sell some stock online without having to extract it from the market. Over the next few weeks I’ll be working to add items into the system and barcode them, which should hopefully make the buying experience easier for everyone!
Site updates
Once the POS is up and running I’ll be revising how the website works and turning it into more of a store, including supporting reserving items at the stall. Because I only have access a few days a week it’ll be a bit of a weird ordering system as I’ll have to confirm the stock is available before finalising the order, but I think it’ll work.
Message board
As a child of the 90s/2000s I spent my teenage years hanging around on bulletin boards, forums etc. I used to run various phpBB forums including for my World of Warcraft server.
There’s a lot of people who enjoy hanging out on the stall and chatting, so I’ve decided to set one up for Cameras Etc. You can check it out over at boards.camerasetc.wales
Myself and a bunch of the regulars will be posting both nonsense and useful information there, particularly around repairs, and I’ll likely be moving these stock updates to there as well as I clearly haven’t been keeping up on the emails - it’s much simpler to update a thread over on the boards. There’s a real lack of open community camera repair info (the biggest group I know of is on Facebook, which can suck it), and I think this is increasingly useful information that I’m keen to share publically for the future.
It’s powered by bobBB, which is my own hobby project from the past few weeks. It’s built to look like the forums of old but on a modern tech stack, and is almost certainly riddled with bugs, so let me know if you face any problems with it. If you want stock updates but don’t want to visit, there are RSS feeds you can subscribe to and I will likely have this email system do a summary email of the stock updates once a month instead of having to write them up.