Great Deal! Sony DSC-P51- See It's Pictures- Extras!
ended - Thursday, March 20, 2008
Auction grade: C-
Starting bid: $48.75
Final selling price: $0 - no bids
Up for sale in this eBay auction is a Sony DSC-P51 digital camera. This is a 2 mega-pixel camera with a 2x optical zoom and a 6x digital zoom. Overall, this is considered a very basic digital camera in today's society. As a comparison, my own Sony Ericsson cell phone has a 2 mega-pixel camera.
For starters, this auction's title needs quite a bit of work. Apart from using the wrong version of "its" (check your grammar), the seller is also leaving out important key words such as "digital camera", "2MP", and even "Cyber-shot". In this case, the seller may want to mention it being a beginner's camera to help entice other bidders.
The auction's description needs a little bit of adjusting, too. For someone who starts their description by saying "Please read this description carefully!", the seller ironically chose a bad typing format. All of the camera, auction, and shipping information is in one giant paragraph. The darkish blue font on the white background looks pretty good, but the general layout needs to be fixed.
All of the camera's technical information needs to be listed separately and with bullet points. There's no point in hiding what little the camera can do, and by suggesting that people check other reviews on the internet means that they will find out the details anyway. You may as well be honest and list everything that you can about the camera right here in the description.
In addition to the camera's information, all of the accessories need to be listed separately and with bullet points, too. Let the buyers know that this comes with a few rechargeable batteries and a charger. Be proud of throwing in the hand strap and those massive memory cards (4mb and 64mb).
The pictures of the camera and all of the included accessories look pretty good. The sample images are where I have my problems. Apart from being very small, they also look like garbage.
This "landscape" shot looks like the seller took a picture of a painting or picture (you can see the flash's reflection on the bottom, tape holding the top of picture against the wall, and the upper edge of the picture in the top right of the image). If you're going to do the trouble of taking a sample image, show us a real full size image of a real landscape shot.
(Next time provide a link to a real landscape picture that you took, not a picture of a picture.)Overall, this is a basic, used camera trying to compete with today's current cameras. I can't fault the seller for trying to sell the camera and hype up all of its features, but I'll be surprised if it sells. The camera's 2x optical zoom isn't going to make any real difference, and the 6x digital zoom is a complete joke (digital zoom itself is useless unless you like pixelated and low resolution images). The selling point of "Really neat is that the camera driver downloads to your PC from the camera itself!" isn't that special today. Almost all of today's cameras can plug into your computer with a USB cable, and some basic models even include a special "docking port" to do the same thing.
This camera did receive quite a few favorable reviews on different websites. That's true. It's also true that the seller will be lucky to get any bids with a starting bid that high. After encouraging buyers to look at the camera reviews, he is essentially making them educate themselves. How many people are going to want to spend at least $58 (starting bid + shipping) for an old, used, outdated digital camera when that much money can be put to a new one?
I would focus on selling the camera itself as an excellent beginner's camera and cut the starting bid in half. I also wouldn't tell people to research the reviews (keep their attention here at the auction). In addition to that, I would list the common picture resolution sizes and show them real sample images of what the camera can do in various lighting conditions.
The reasons for the auction's lower score are for the title needing a lot of work, the description needing spacing and formatting, and the poor / fake sample images.
