I often scan Craigslist for lenses and read an ad in which the OP had gift card money in his Amazon account and was looking for someone who wanted to purchase an item on Amazon and he would discount it by 20% in order to get the cash out. I was a little leery of the offer but wrote him anyway. Turns out he's a student at UCSD and has $700 in a gift card and wanted cash instead of Amazon items. After a few emails he sounded very legitimate to me. So much so that after we got to know one another he decided for warranty purposes it would be best to send the item directly to me so that I would be the original owner (Nikon is sticky when it comes to these kind of things). My wife has the old 70-300mm ED lens from back in our film days but I've not been very impressed with its performance on the D7k. While everything I've read (especially from Mansurvos - see HERE) sounded like the newer 70-300mm F/4.5-5.6G VRII lens was wonderful for the price. So I went ahead and accepted this young man's offer and today the lens arrived safely and I can't wait to take her out for a spin. Just to be sure I'm not missing something, I put a call into Amazon to make sure this wasn't purchased with a stolen credit card or ? and turns out it came from a gift card and as far as they could tell it was 100% legitimate. All in all it worked out to $470 (plus $3.99 overnight shipping) for a $589 lens!
The moral of this adventure is that Craigslist can be a scary place sometimes and you certainly need to be careful when dealing with people there but now and then you can score some fabulous deals. Now I can't wait to take this new baby to the San Diego zoo and see just what this lens can do!
The moral of this adventure is that Craigslist can be a scary place sometimes and you certainly need to be careful when dealing with people there but now and then you can score some fabulous deals. Now I can't wait to take this new baby to the San Diego zoo and see just what this lens can do!