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What to look for in an used camera?
Hi all:
A friend of mine recently bought a second-hand HVX-201 from an apparently legitimate dealer, here in Spain. She was told that the camera had been used in a 3-week production during the summer, and that after that it had been revised by Panasonic’s official technical service before being delivered. Well, she received the camera today, and from what she told me, it has 354 hours of recording logged. Strange… considering that it would have to been recording for about 18 hours a day. Not only that, but at first glance, it doesn’t look to be in a very good state (she tells me that the LCD screen looks a bit scratched), so she wants to test it throughly before deciding whether to return it.
My question is: what specific things should we look for, when testing the camera? Besides the obvious physical damage (a scratched lens, say). What kind of things can be wrong with it that might not be obvious at a first glance?
Thanks in advance.
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4 Replies
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That is what you get when you buy used. Anything can be wrong with the camera if you do not know what it has been through.
I have bought used equipment from reputable dealers in the past based on their description. All my used gear is in good working condition.
Steve Eisen
Eisen Video Productions
Board of Directors
Chicago Final Cut Pro Users Group -
Thanks for your advice. The dealer in question looked legitimate, as I said, and they told us that the camera would be used first in a shoot. What we are thinking is that they haven’t told us the full story about the kind of shoot(s) it was.
To be specific, my question is: what kind of tests can we perform to make sure that the camera is okay? The obvious ones I’ve thought of include: checking it for obvious physical damage, taking it out and shoot some stuff to see if focus/iris/zoom controls respond well and whether the autofocus and exposure work correctly, as well as white balance outdoors and indoors. Also, test whether built-in microphones are working, whether the audio input levels are correct, whether the tape mechanism works, whether it can read/write P2 cards correctly, connect it to a computer through the FW port to see if it works…
The above is what I’ve thought of so far. What concerns me are more subtle things, the kind you can’t discover in the tests I’ve already mentioned. What specifically? Well, I don’t know… I don’t have anything special in mind, which is why I posted asking for ideas from people who might know more than I.
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Hi Paulo,
If you saved money then it’s a bargain, Take it out and run down the street with it recording, do everthing you mentioned and if it works , then all is good, Seriously though, you can get a lemon even with new gear, don’t stress, just put it thru it’s passes and do it fast so your supplier can’t say you sat about waiting for a problem to come up.Cheers
Tom K
olinevideo.com.au -
Thanks a lot for your response. Well, in case anyone cares, I finally had a look at the camera, and everything seemed to work as advertised… but its appearance wasn’t too good. The screen seemed to have most of its protective cover scratched, and the paint was worn in some parts of the body, so the point that you could see the metal beneath it. So we decided to return it and exchange it for a new camera, not so much because it didn’t work, but because the dealer had misrepresented to us the kind of 2nd-hand camera he was selling (this one had clearly more than 3 weeks of use).
One thing I noted: after shooting some stuff in a card and opening it in Final Cut 6, I noted that the “Device model name” column in “Log & Transfer” said “HVX-200E”, despite the fact that the label on the camera said clearly HVX-201. Is this normal?
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