Hong Kong Digital Camera shopping - Photo accessory and Carl Zeiss lenses shopping in Hong Kong

Where to find high end lenses and accessories for your Photo equipment and digital cameras in Hong Kong

Besides my Acer Ferrari 5005 laptop shopping in Hong Kong I had one more major series of equipment I wanted to get from Hong Kong - Carl Zeiss lenses for my Sony Alpha A100 digital DSLR camera. Precisely I was looking for:

1. A Minolta macro 100 lense. While Minolta is out of business, it still has some of the worlds finest lenses and many new lenses still are on the market. All Minolta lenses match to the Sony A100.
2. A Carl Zeiss 85ZA lense - specially for my flower greeting cards and flower wallpapers
3. A wide angle lense specially for my scenery wallpapers and beach wallpapers
4. A number of photo accessories - mainly high quality UV and polarizing filters for each lense and a larger professional camera bag

Having my hotel ( Hotel Ramada ) in Kowloon - I was walking many miles thru all the local shopping streets and found on day one my new Minolta macro lense. Since Minolta no longer exists and only professional photographers might ask for such a high end lense - there was no place for bargain prices. I was happy to find one such high end macro lense at all - the price was well above 1000 US$ but that Minolta quality is always worth the price.

I also found my Carl Zeiss 1.4 85ZA at one of the many Kowloon Photo shops - here again: The world's finest lense manufacturer has a fix price and that fine lense is all around the globe some 1300 US$ - also in Hong Kong! In the Philippines however I would have paid some 1900 US$.

My last piece of fine lenses was the wide angle. Many hours of intense searching in Kowloon as well as in the Mong Kok shopping area was without success ...

Until I was again in one of the many larger electronic (smaller electronic such as cellphones and PDAs, etc) and photo shops in Mong Kok - I curiously looked for Carl Zeiss and saw that in this Mong Kok shopping streets several photo shops had Carl Zeiss lenses on stock. One such shop even had a large selection of Carl Zeiss lenses. I look - just out of curiosity - at the price for the 16-80 mm wide angle zoom for the Sony A100 and the price of some 700 US$ was surprisingly low. Hence instead of a fixed focus 28 mm wide angle I asked the sales person to mount the wide angle zoom on his A100 body to let me see how much distortion that lense had fully open angle at 16mm. The result was a surprising high quality and I opted for my Carl Zeiss wide angle. A direct comparison between the Sony lenses and the Carl Zeiss lenses may follow soon with some photos. I am currently already in Baguio City for my next roses photos session. The previous flower girl as my photo assistant is hired again and we are just waiting for some sunny morning hours for our first photo shooting sessions.

In the Mong Kok photo stores I also found all my filters for all lenses and my large camera / accessory bag. I had to search thru several stores to get all 3 diameters of the high quality filter I had in mind - but most shops had a large selection of all common diameters on stock.

Hence

Photo shopping at Mong Kok

If photo equipment and digital cameras or camera accessories are on your shopping list - best is you start first at Mong Kok shopping area - a large road within 100 meters from Mong Kok MTR station and easy to find !!

Prices for photo equipment and quality lenses may be just about in the same range as in low price quality stores in US or Europe. The selection in the Philippines is at zero or near zero - hence I had no savings - except again the very substantial savings for my Carl Zeiss 1.4 85ZA - but I had no local shopping options at all.

Love and Bliss

hans