About
One person, a nightly crawler, and a question I kept asking myself before every used purchase: is this a good price, or should I wait?
Last updated October 2026
Who
I'm Ryan Hoffman. I live in West Seattle and I aspire to be a photographer. I shoot birds, mostly, with an OM System OM-1 and the 100-400mm II, plus a Fujifilm X-T5 for travel and the street. I also collect CCD-sensor cameras from the 2000s, the ones that shoot better than their spec sheets suggest, and I keep a few early Four Thirds bodies running. They are magic. The full list, with what each one goes for used today, is on my shelf, and the photos are at photo.longwalkhome.net.
I'm not a dealer, I don't work for one, and I don't sell gear through this site. I buy used, like most people reading this, and I built this tool to make it easier to make better decisions.
Why this exists
Used camera prices move, and nobody was writing them down. A dealer's page shows you today's number with no history. A forum thread shows you what someone paid last spring. Neither tells you whether $1,342 for an X-T5 is a deal or the top of its range. So in May 2026 I started recording the lowest asking price for every camera I could, every night, from every seller I could reach, and kept doing it.
That turned into a catalog of about 1,600 bodies, lenses and accessories across 35 brands, priced nightly from MPB, KEH, B&H Photo, eBay and UsedPhotoPro, with every observation kept. Each camera page shows the current low, how it compares with the model's own 90-day and all-time history, and where the cheapest copy is. The methodology page explains exactly how the numbers are collected, normalized and scored.
How I keep it honest
The crawler writes what it finds. It does not know which sellers pay a commission, and the ranking does not either. If eBay is cheaper, the page says eBay. Three kinds of outbound link do pay a small commission (eBay, MPB and Amazon); the disclosure spells out which, and you pay the same price either way.
Prices are asking prices in US dollars, not sold prices, and every page says so. When a number is an estimate rather than an observation, it's labelled and shown in grey.
What it doesn't do
It doesn't predict prices. It doesn't cover sellers outside the US, except for dead systems where the US market is empty and those listings are marked. It doesn't have eBay sold prices, only active listings. And it can't tell you whether a camera is right for you; the guides try, but the verdict on each page is about the price, not the camera.
Get in touch
Wrong price, missing camera, a seller I should be tracking, or a number you want to cite: hello@shouldyoubuythiscamera.com. If you're a journalist or researcher, the reports are written to be quoted, and each camera page carries a citation line with the observation date.