"James Sweet" wrote in message
news:SLxXc.11500$%11.341@trnddc02...

"Brian MacD" wrote in message
...

"Paul Rubin" wrote in message
...
"Brian MacD" writes:
The camcorder was a very good consumer model 3 or 4
years ago, the Sony TRV11, and cost about $US2,200.

A TRV11 wasn't worth anywhere near that much 3 or 4 years ago. I
think they were around $1200 new. You can buy them used on ebay now
for $350 or so. They are consumer cameras, and as such, there will be
a lot of them out there with very low usage (a few shots of the kid's
xmas play, a few more of the cat jumping around, you get the idea).

That was the price "down under" in Australia and New Zealand. We
could never have bought one for $US1200 here! In local currency they
were well over $3000 here, so you are lucky in the US to have such
good prices!

How much could it possibly cost to ship one to you from another country?

There is a lot more involved than just the shipping costs from one
country to another. For example, the NZ dollar is not on par with the
US dollar, $1NZ is worth about 64 US cents now but has been down
below 50 US cents, so this has to be taken into account. Also, US
camcorders are based on the NTSC system, but we use PAL here,
so it is unwise to import camcorders from the USA if you need a PAL
camcorder. If you import camcorders from overseas, there is also
the possibility that you will have to ship them back to the country
of origin when they need repairs under guarantee (or so I'm told).
NZ and Australia also have goods and services taxes (GST) that
have to be paid on camcorders (12.5% in New Zealand). And the
local resellers like their 30% to 50% margin on what they sell. All
these factors make buying camcorders in Australasia very expensive!