This tip comes courtesy of an avid Frugal Japan reader, Curt Sampson. He has kindly given me permission to share with you some very useful camera and film buying tips! Many thanks, Curt!
Unfortunately, I can’t recommend any of the major camera shops for electronics purchases. Even taking the points into account, you’re going to pay ten to twenty percent more than you’d pay in Akihabara. To figure out where to go to buy this stuff, use www.kakaku.com (Japanese only, unfortunately, but heck, for this stuff you really need only katakana to get by). They’ll show you who’s got the lowest prices, and who’s got what in stock. And the site works on a keitai, too, with maps even, so that you can do your research whilst wandering around in the area.
One area where the big camera shops are ok, however, is film. It’s as cheap there as it’s ever going to get. And developing is not too bad, either, if you go for the “original brand” (in-house) version. For 800 yen you can get a 36-exposure roll of color film developed and get two sets of prints. Black and white is more expensive, but if you’re using black-and-white film, you should be developing it yourself and saving yourself piles of money. (Not to mention buying bulk film and loading it yourself–that will almost halve your film costs.)
But the cameras themselves: again, too expensive. See www.kakaku.com. But wait, what are you doing buying a new camera in the first place? There are tons of used camera shops in Tokyo (see this site), and if you avoid the cameras that collectors want, you can get a pretty good deal. Your best bargains are going to be for used digital cameras; now that the market has matured, you can get quite good 3-4 megapixel cameras for well under 20,000 yen. And most people probably don’t want a seven megapixel camera anyway, for two reasons. First, most people just don’t make prints that are all that big, so the extra pixels are just wasting storage space on your hard drive. Second, there’s no point in having all those pixels if you’ve got a crappy lens that’s ruining the image anyway.
© 2006 Wendy J. Imura.