I did not buy a lens today.

[BF Hammer]

I finally paid off my car loan 10 days ago, and I have my home equity line of credit down to where I will pay off in days. But I came very close to extending that loan out 2-3 more months.

For the holiday weekend, my local camera store was having big promotions and another "Cash 4 Cameras" trade-in event. For fun I loaded up the listing of used gear as I do weekly. I find: Used Nikon Z 180-600mm F/5.6-6.3 VR NIKONZ $1,499.99 . OK, I want to be a rock and stick to the financial plan this year. But I can trade in the Sigma 150-600mm, and I'm oh-so-close I can touch it.

The short story, I hurried up after work today and gathered up all the bits for my Sigma. Knowing full well the lens could already be snapped up. I arrived, and it was sold. I think the used list is updated on Tuesdays. It is possible to give a sigh of sadness and relief at the same time. So I brought my lens back home and I will have that upgrade in some months on my own schedule. Disappointed the sales staff a lot.

 

[Needa]

Had to purchase a car as our meet an untimely demise. Certainly could do without the payments. Haven't had house or car payment for years it's nice, can almost afford to eat. No photo equipment in the near future.

 

[BF Hammer]

One day later, I still have not bought a lens. But I did just buy a PC.

A refurbished Lenovo tiny desktop from Woot (a deal of the day site) so I do have to act if the deal is right. And I really do need to update my photo editing PC desperately. The CPU in my 16 year old Asus PC is so outdated that pretty much any software released today can crash trying to call functions that do not exist on the hardware. My recent adventure in pixel-shift image editing just hammered that point home very hard to me.

 

[benhasajeep]

Bought 3 lenses yesterday. But none today. Been thinking about buying a new PC, but each time I look they want todays prices for PC's that have 3 and 4 generations old processors in them. And try to make it sound like your getting a great deal.

 

[Clovishound]

Blame it on AI. Memory card prices have jumped considerably due to massive expansion of AI data centers. I'm sure it's affecting everything in the computer industry.

 

[BF Hammer]

RAM and storage drives are pre-ordered for and have the factories running at capacity to fulfill the AI data centers being built. This will affect our ability to buy digital electronics for months/years to come.

The PC I bought is a refurb. Read that as lease return that has been wiped and reloaded with Windows 11. I hope that the BIOS is not password-protected like the last time I bought a laptop as a refurb. But I got the loaded model with 32GB of RAM and 2TB SSD. But at $580 that is approaching what I paid for the ASUS I am replacing back in April 2011. That was also a renewed unit and used older hardware. And this newer computer is the Lenovo tiny PC form factor with no optical drive. Basically a laptop with more I/O ports and no display attached.