Canon 5D Mark II price shoots up

[CanonJim]

To perhaps shed some light, an Authorized Canon dealer is bound by their agreements with Canon to sell their branded equipment NO LOWER than certain prices. If a bunch of dealers, such as Adorama, B&H, Cameta, Abe's of Maine, etc all raised their prices within a day or so, you can safely bet that Canon raised their prices to the dealers. And since there's so much competition in that market, they all charge the LOWEST price they can, not the highest. If any of them started knocking hundreds of bucks off their Canon inventory, they'd soon lose the authorized status they have, and Canon USA wouldn't wholesale them any more stuff. So it's not a conspiracy so much as a market price. Demand goes up, price goes up. I think much of the Japanese manufacturing capability is still offline due to the events of March 2011.

If you find any place selling name brand equipment, whether it's Canon or Nikon or Sony, Olympus, Pentax, whatever, at a substantially lower price than all the other guys, you can bet it's a ripoff of some sort. There's just no way in hell that an authorized dealer can sell a 5D for a bunch less than everybody else.

 

[molested_cow]

Here's a conspiracy theory from a Nikon user.

The 5DMIII isn't selling as well because people would rather go for the D800 or the cheaper 5DII. Since they can't do anything about their competition, they bumped their price on the 5DII to push folks into giving the 5DIII a harder look.

Then, there's the D600 at $2200. Oh snap!