I'm lucky enough to have a salmon-bearing stream on my property here in the northwest. They are an extremely inspiring species to watch through their lifecycle. Tenacious.
You can dodge that; go to the "Explore by sectors" a bit further down, pick any. Now you can search without having to hand over an email address. But yeah, the first time I hit that "search here.. but only after you provide an email", I bounced.
Any tips for buying used gear? I purchased three consecutive Nikon FEs off of eBay, and each one arrived with a different mechanical issue. I was lucky enough to be covered by return policies in those cases, but I'm hesitant to purchase again.
I've had a few Nikon FE bodies. I think they're excellent cameras. But I did need to have them serviced / repaired from time to time.
Depending on where you are, buying from a second-hand camera shop is a good avenue because you'll get some sort of warranty, and you can also ensure the camera is working before you buy it.
Checkout KEH.com - they will rate the gear and test and often CLA things. Often times the stuff labeled "bargain" will be functionaly fine but just scratched up physically.
I highly recommend the Nikon FM2 instead of the FE or the Pentax MX
KEH used to be a lot better before they got acquired. Their ratings have taken a tumble over the last decade.
I don't have a better answer though - I still buy from them from time to time. eBay is the big alternative if you're looking for something specific. Note that Japanese sellers list a lot of stuff on ebay but they tend to do it at fairly high BIN prices that don't necessarily move instantly - so don't look at those prices and think that's normal, they're just waiting for someone with a nice thick wallet to get impatient. The prices stuff actually sells at will be much lower.
Pentax MX is a good camera though, very similar to the FM2 (although lacking the 1/2000th shutter of the FM2n). Maybe you're thinking of the Pentax ME, which (like the Nikon FE/FG) are another early-electronics camera and suffered very high failure rates over the years (with depleted spare parts reserves at this point). Nothing wrong with the MX though - it's a mechanical workhorse, small, reliable, bright viewfinder. I'd actually categorize it as an underappreciated gem, even though it's fairly well-appreciated in the Pentax community.
FEs and FGs (and Pentax ME/ME Super) are notorious for electronics failures (which may be manifesting as "various mechanical issues"). They were early movers on flexible-printed-circuit technology and it did NOT work out for them in the long term.
(as opposed to the mechanical rube-goldberg approach of previous models - a camera is basically a series of mousetraps each springing the next mousetrap in the series. Pushing the button triggers the mirror and the stopdown lever, the mirror triggers the shutter curtain, the curtain triggers the flash and the timer, the timer triggers the second curtain, the second curtain triggers the mirror down, etc etc. Electronics let you orchestrate that all a lot more simply, but early electronics weren't as reliable in the long run.)
Generally, people seem to go for all-mechanical cameras (usually only the light meter is electronic, or sometimes they don't have a light meter) because at least those are repairable when they break. For the Nikon line the FM1 and FM2 and FM2n are very popular, the F and F2, as well as the Nikkormats. For Pentax, the highest end camera is the LX, but they are known as somewhat flaky, the MX is very common and a very nice camera with an extremely large and bright viewfinder.
In general you may just have to resign yourself to buying something and sending it in to be serviced. You can seek out someone else who's already done it for you, and maybe you can get a better deal like that vs buying something cheap and sending it in yourself, but either way, they are mechanical devices and someone has to clean and lube them every 20 years or so.
Unfortunately a lot of the people who do that repair are extremely old at this point, a lot of them did repair work at $BRAND service centers in the 70s and 80s and branched out on their own when it closed down. But there is no equivalent pipeline training new repairmen and when they die, that's it, the knowledge dies with them. And a lot of them have warehoused a lot of parts, and unless someone else buys the whole lot then parts get a lot tougher when they die too. So if you want something, don't hesitate, buy it and get it serviced and hopefully you will only run into minor cleaning/seal replacement/etc type issues.
As usual, 90% Of Everything Is Crap. Nobody wants to shoot a Kodak Pony 135 (or even something like the Argus C3, which I'd argue is actually OK in comparison...). The stuff that's spiking in price is the premium, professional-tier gear that people actually want and that can produce high-quality results. There is also a preference for certain name-brands that have better service chains or parts availability as a whole - I have no idea who I'd send a Kowa or Tokina (or even Canon FD) camera to, but someone is always going to be able to service Nikon or Hasselblad. The ability to put modern glass like Sigma or Samyang onto an older Pentax or Nikon body is really nice too, it gives you a full-frame body fairly cheaply, so "mount is still in use today" is a bonus IMO.
(note you don't need to buy a digital of the same brand... mirrorless cameras can use almost all the glass if you focus and stopdown manually, and this is actually more accurate because most digital cameras aren't designed for manual focusing, while mirrorless usually have some helper functionality like "focus peaking" on the Sony line...)
I personally think coatings are one under-appreciated characteristic. Pentax was a very early mover on multi-coatings with "SMC", Nikon had their own version that is alright, Hasselblad struck a deal where they adopted SMC as the T* coating in exchange for trading a license to the Distagon lens design (SMC Pentax K28/2 and SMC Pentax 67 55/4 late variant), Fuji had the "EBC" multi-coating. A lot of other 70s cameras either were single-coated or had inferior multi-coatings, and suffer from flare much more heavily. When Pentax's SMC patents expired in the early 90s, everybody else quietly copied SMC because it was just so far ahead of everyone else.
Sorry I don't have more specific information about pricing, but it's been years since I really looked, and I was kinda shocked by the prices I saw recently too. I don'tknow that I would have paid the prices these days either, some stuff is 4x or more what I paid 10-15 years ago. But maybe this helps explain some of the market psychology a bit.
I personally think the Pentax MX and Nikon FM/FM2/FM2n or Nikkormat FT2n are some of the best options all around, but I'm sure everyone else has realized that too. I mostly shoot medium format these days, and the Fuji GW690 and GSW690 are still fairly reasonable and provide top-tier optical quality.
A lot of stuff becomes feasible with free unlimited energy. For instance, carbon air capture (could even become a protein source) and green hydrogen (for applications like production of iron via direct reduction, so we can finally get rid of blast furnaces).
Why do you think fusion would provide free unlimited energy? With any design even slightly visible on the horizon right now, a single plant will cost billions of dollars and barely produce a few MW of energy. This is much worse than any equivalent investment in solar power, which similarly requires 0 fuel.
Assuming anything else would happen is ignoring human nature.
The only way to get significant reduction of consumption is via catastrophe. There's a good chance that'll happen, but there's no feasible different way that I can see. Take away large levels of comfort from large amounts of people, and you will inevitably see bloodshed. (Yes, I know that unsustainable consumption will also lead to catastrophe. Welcome to the 21st century, where the path forward is narrow and uncertain, while the stakes are higher than ever)
Hm, interesting. I was initially unconvinced that this could be a problem, but some back-of-the-envelope math says it's at least conceivable:
The sun deposits enormous amounts of energy onto earth every single day: Around 340 W/m² (averaged over the whole earth), or a total of 43 x 10^15 Watts. Essentially all of it is radiated back into space (mostly as infrared). We have a temperature equilibrium because energy intake is largely constant (surface/cloud albedo notwithstanding) while radiation back into space grows with fourth power of (surface/atmospheric) temperature.
Current global energy consumption is on the order of 2 x 10^12 Watts, over four orders of magnitude lower. If we somehow increase energy production by ~two orders of magnitude, to the point of ourselves emitting 1% of the solar energy intake on top, the surface temperature would need to rise by about 0.75 °C to maintain equilibrium. An order of magnitude more (i.e. three orders of magnitude above current consumption, roughly 10% of solar intake) would correspond to a 7.2 °C rise.
(Point of reference: Global power consumption has barely doubled in the past 40 years. No telling what "free" energy would cause though.)
Presumably we'd have geo-engineered a solution by that point, but it's surprisingly not too early to start thinking about the problem!
That's assuming the anthropomorphic heat is spread evenly over the earth, rather than concentrated and creating a heat island effect.
You probably can drop an order and a half of magnitude off of that number just based on concentration. And if you don't think 'free' fusion will cause us to use several times more power than we currently use, then I don't know what to tell you.
It'd be interesting to ponder whether such a "heat ray" would work, in terms of thermodynamics. Some kind of heat pump, the hot side of which is hot enough to radiate into space? I can't imagine that having a net cooling effect when considering the Carnot efficiency of a refrigeration cycle. Maybe a giant ice machine in space? (Then again, any ice would probably create more heating than cooling as it enters our gravity well or deorbits). Anyone have any ideas?
