Hasselblad X1D-50c - specs and US prices

[razrblck]

Wow, that's a discount of nearly 4.000 EUR.

I should probably ask for pricing on a H5D-50c Wifi as well. I must say I have spent quite a bit of money with them, besides knowing them personally for years, so your mileage may vary.

[siddhaarta]

I should probably ask for pricing on a H5D-50c Wifi as well. I must say I have spent quite a bit of money with them, besides knowing them personally for years, so your mileage may vary.

I am quite sure that I won't get that kind of percentage anywhere . What puzzles me is the kind of margin dealers have obviously even with this camera (assuming they still gain something selling the X1D to you)

[E.J. Peiker]

They may have to reprice this camera in Euro and Pounds Sterling prior to intro after what's happening to those currencies today, I doubt they will rebound to previous levels for some time...  Either that or drop the US price... but that's probably less likely. 

Otherwise you could just buy one in Europe, get the VAT back and save significantly on US prices.

[razrblck]

I don't think margins are that high for those cameras. My shop gets them from a huge national retailer at good prices, but on bodies and lenses they probably get less than 10% net margin to work with.

They recently had huge issues with the official Nikon distributor for Italy (NITAL). They were getting net margins below 4% mostly for non-business related reasons, so now they sell gray market Nikon bodies with third party extended warranties. I also don't think they will be able to keep that offer for long after what happened, but the high end camera market is so small and targeted that it might not change much even with weaker currencies.

Olympus is the one giving the best margins (on some models over 35% net), with Canon being a close second.

[Rob C]

Ah, prices.

I used to have a very good and knowledgeable local dealer perhaps two hundred yards away from my studio. He sold Nikon, Leica and Hasselblad amongst other brands, and really knew his cameras and lenses.

One day, I walked in to buy something and he told me he was sorry, he couldn't sell it to me: Hasselblad and he had parted company because he was unable to source from Hasselblad at the prices the bigger London dealerships could sell to the public.

There is something more than a little smelly in relationships where dealer A can buy the same product from the maker at a lower price than can dealer B. Smelly, and a bit stupid: both dealers are in a position to sell the same product, and if the larger dealer can sell more cheaply due to his internal efficiency controls, great, but no manufacturer should be in the position to play kingmaker, and effectively decide which dealers will prosper and which die. Stupid, yes, because that product would have sold anyway, and therefore the prejudiced dealer/maker relationship has only served to reduce the maker's profit margin and the possible outlet opportunities.

For the buyer, it means fewer local shops hold anything - if they even exist - mine vanished. This was all years before the Internet; such madness, taken as the norm today, is not really a product of Internet shopping changes, it's a product of stupidity, fear, greed and semi-thuggery that started a long time ago.

Some say the buyer benefits; I don't think so. If anything, he becomes victim of the shrinking value of everything to all the participants on the way to the final sale. Maybe this is why the customer has also become the unwitting QC department post the purchase event. Stretch anything too thinly and it'll snap, one way or the other.

Rob

[razrblck]

That's almost what is going on with NITAL here (they also carry other stuff like Lowepro, Lexar, Epson). They do some really stupid games with smaller shops, in that one orders a small number of cameras but receives more than he ordered and is forced to pay it all to not lose the dealership for official products of the covered brands. They don't care about customers or final sales, they just want to sell stuff and they probably found out it's far easier to make money that way.

The other part of this idiotic act is that my particular shop, despite the competent people in it, isn't much loved by the regional representative for NITAL. That means not only worse prices, but complete lack of marketing material or any useful info to actually sell the products. Sometimes they managed to stick it to NITAL and their little games, like one time they had 30 Nikon 1 models delivered that they never even wanted in the first place, but when it happens to one body or lens, or even backpacks, memory cards, etc they usually keep it if it's stuff that can be sold.

If I wanted to just save money I could buy anything online in the EU, since Italian prices tend to be extremely inflated, but losing the support of a good local shop would be a pretty big loss for me. I like having someone that can handle any issue I might have with my gear, show me new stuff, even give it for free for a spin. I like the human touch in all that, and that I can much more easily form my own opinion on a product without having to trust online reviews.