What is my camera actually worth?
How to price used gear

The most common question I get is not about a camera. It's “what is this worth?” Usually the person has already looked on eBay, seen a number they liked, and then wondered why nobody is biting at that price. Pricing used gear is not complicated, but the obvious sources mislead, and the gap between an asking price and a selling price is where most sellers lose weeks. Here is how I price gear every day, and how to do it yourself.

The short answer

Why asking prices lie

Search any camera on eBay and you'll see a wall of listings. What you're looking at is every price that has not worked yet. The seller asking $4,800 for an M10 has been asking $4,800 for six weeks; the one who asked $3,900 sold it on Tuesday and is gone from the results. Asking prices are survivorship bias in reverse: the dead listings are the ones you see. Dealers also list high because they can wait, and because a dealer price includes a warranty, a return window and a margin that a private seller does not get to charge.

Filter to sold and completed listings, ignore the top and bottom outliers, and look at the middle of the last 30 to 60 days. That cluster is the market. If you want to go deeper, open a few of those sold listings and compare their condition and what was included to yours. Two sold prices for the same model can differ by 30 percent and both be correct.

Condition is most of the price

A camera is not a fixed-value object. The same model in Like New and Good condition can be two different price brackets, and buyers can tell the difference from the photos. Our condition guide lays out the tiers we use on Aperture.market: New, Like New, Excellent, Good, Fair, and As Is. Most privately owned gear is honestly Excellent or Good. Very little is Like New, and calling it that when it isn't is how you get a return and a bad review.

Factor	Moves the price up	Moves the price down
Condition tier	Like New or Excellent, with photos to prove it	Good or Fair; brassing, dents, haze in the finder
Shutter count	Low for the model's age	High, or the seller doesn't know
Box and papers	Original box, card and paperwork, matching serial	Loose body, no history
Accessories	Spare batteries, charger, strap, caps, hood, filters	Third-party charger, missing hood, no caps
Service history	Dated CLA receipt or Leica service record	“Works fine” and nothing else
Season	October through December, and spring graduation season	Mid-January to March, late summer
Market timing	Model is discontinued and still wanted	Successor just announced; used supply floods in
Where it's sold	Local, in person, no fees for either side	Marketplace fees of 10–15% come out of your number

What accessories, boxes and papers actually add

For most Sony, Canon and Nikon gear, the box is worth almost nothing. A spare OEM battery adds roughly its retail price, a good hood adds a bit, and that's about it. Leica is different. A boxed Leica with the card, the papers and a matching serial on the box sells faster and typically fetches a premium that is meaningful on a $5,000 body, because the next buyer is thinking about resale too. For film Leicas, a dated receipt from a known repair technician is worth more than the box, since it tells the buyer they won't be spending several hundred dollars on a service in year one.

Lenses follow the same logic. Original caps and hood, a clean front element, and clear evidence of no haze or fungus matter more than the packaging. Note the exact version, because a 35mm Summicron-M from the 1970s and a current ASPH are both “a 35 Summicron” and are not in the same price range. If you're pricing one, the 35 Summicron-M value page shows real sales across versions.

How the /value pages are built

Every number on our value pages comes from a real listing. Most rows are items MF Camera Store in Folsom sold through its own channels, with the condition and the final price; the rest are listings by photographers on Aperture.market. Sold rows are confirmed transactions. Live rows are asking prices and are marked as such, so you can see the gap between the two for yourself. There is no algorithm smoothing the results and no estimate when there's no data; if a model only has three sales, you see three sales.

That's why the ranges on a page like Leica M10 or Sony A7R V tend to sit under what eBay search results suggest. They are what people paid, not what sellers wanted. Check the condition column before you compare; a Good-condition sale is not a comp for your Excellent one.

Seasonality is real

Camera gear has a calendar. October through December is the strongest selling window, driven by holiday buying and year-end bonuses. Spring brings graduation and wedding-season buyers. Late January through March is slow, and so is the dead of August. A new model announcement knocks the used price of its predecessor down within weeks as early adopters sell to upgrade, then it stabilises once the supply clears. If you can choose when to sell, sell into demand, not away from it.

Two weeks or two months

Decide which seller you are. If you want it gone in two weeks, price at or just under the middle of recent sold prices for your condition tier, take sharp photos, and write a complete description. The right buyer sees it, recognises a fair deal, and acts before someone else does. If you can wait two months, you can price at the upper end of the sold range and hold, but understand that is a different strategy with a real cost in time, and that a listing that sits for weeks starts to look like something is wrong with it.

What doesn't work is pricing 20 percent above the sold range “to leave room,” because buyers who know the market don't open overpriced listings to make offers. They skip them. When you've picked your number, our listing writer turns your model, condition and what's included into a clean description in a minute, and listing on Aperture.market means that number is what you actually receive, with zero commission and a local buyer you can hand the camera to in person.