Grey Market - Photographic Equipment

Photographic Equipment

Generally regarded as legal in most countries, parallel imports make expensive photographic equipment attractive to savvy users. The grey market in photographic equipment is thriving in highly developed and heavily taxed states like Singapore with dealers importing directly from lower taxed states and selling at a lower price, creating competition against a local authorised distributor. Grey sets, as colloquially called, are often comparable to authorised imports. Lenses or flash units of parallel imports often only differ by the warranty provided, and since the grey sets were manufactured for another state, photographic equipment manufacturers often offer local warranty, instead of international warranty, which will render grey sets ineligible for warranty claims with the manufacturer. Because of the nature of local warranties, importers of grey sets usually offer their own warranty schemes with reduced benefits or lasting a shorter period of time. Grey sets do not differ particularly from an authorised import. They look and function identically, apart from the manufacturer's warranties having been voided. In the salad days of camera sales during the 60s and 70s, when the latter were made of satin chrome outside and brass inside and lenses had amber coating, the bargain basements for Japanese equipment were Hong Kong and Singapore, through which goods were channelled to European shop windows bypassing the often substantial levy of the official importers. World-market pricing and the Internet have largely eliminated this today and certainly the two former sources, that have become expensive if anything. With the dollar in a permanent state of anemia, the cheapest source is probably the USA, a market highly esteemed by manufacturers albeit with a murderous state of competition because of consumer-happy, if highly diligent, bargain hunters. This has led Canon to give their hard-selling DSLR cameras names like "Rebel" in the USA and "EOS" outside it, aimed at preventing the competitively priced US-merchandise reaching Europe where sales are slower but achieve a higher profit.