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A Rant About UK Prices for Electronics

I don't know if you live in the UK and have noticed this but we are being ripped off. Well, a lot of the time anyway. In fact what happened when I went to buy a Pocket Wizard Flex TT6 really annoyed me about UK pricing.

Lately, we seem to pay pretty much the same in £'s as we do in $'s.

I can definitely remember a time when the UK buying price was always less than the Dollar amount. For example, a camera that cost $2,000 in the US would be around £1,600 in the UK.

Anyway, I digress but more on that later.

I have been using the Canon EOS 5D Mark IV for a while now and love it for stills. However, on a recent property shoot it was obvious that my Flex TT5 Pocket Wizards wouldn't play nicely with it. They were intermittent and sometimes wouldn't fire at all.

A bit of research showed that rather than a firmware update, I needed the new Pocket Wizard Flex TT6. This unit is not only compatible with the 5D Mark IV but also backwards compatible with the Flex TT5. Nice. I was worried that I would need to replace my entire set up.

UK vs USA for Pocket Wizard Flex TT6 Pricing

So, I went to my favourite online shopping place, Amazon, and did a search. I always try to buy locally or at least in the UK where I can so I searched Google for other outlets too.

I found various prices for the TT6 (prices updated July 2021):

Quite varied already with a £53.31 difference. Like I said, I like to buy in the UK when I can so I bought the Flex TT6 from Amazon. However...

Later, I did another search, this time in the US after seeing an Amazon ad. I found the Flex TT6 at Amazon US for just £134 ($186)! I duly cancelled my UK order and bought from the US instead whilst saving over £60 on one unit!!!

That included shipping and an import duty deposit. Even if the import duty is a little more, that is a huge saving over the UK prices. The seller has a 100% lifetime rating with over 24,000 products sold so I feel pretty safe with this purchase.

Am I Being Dumb?

That is such a huge difference, I am waiting for someone to tell me I have made a huge mistake. However, I will wait until the unit arrives and update this post.

Another Example of Rip Off Britain

Take the recently released Nikon Z7 as another example. Most places such as Jessops are selling the Nikon Z7 for £3,399. What are the US selling it for? Well, the Nikon Z7 Mirrorless Digital Camera at B & H Photo Video is selling for $3,396.95! That is LESS than the UK figure in £££'s!

Using today's exchange rate of 1.3 Dollars to the Pound, we should be looking at around £2600!

With that difference of £800, I could easily:

Yeah, yeah, currency exchange rates and all that, I know but...

Am I missing something here? Am I being dumb? I know I used to pay a lot less than the US prices in the past. I would really appreciate your thoughts on this. Thanks for reading today's rant and please share and comment below.