Here's how to obtain high quality equipment at bargain basement prices

TechBid might be full of some of the most obscure used ex-broadcast equipment in existence, but it's also a great place to pick up a genuine bargain.

One of the best ways to subject extremely expensive film and TV gear to a brutal reality check is to imagine what it’ll look like in fifteen years, covered in scratches, coffee rings and bits of grubby tape annotated “DO NOT USE INPUT 3.” At that point, when something’s well over the hill and only still in the rack because it’s too much trouble to unscrew everything and move it down a unit, the bubble of public relations which, might once have surrounded it, will have been well and truly punctured.

At that point, we will be in a position to evaluate its real technical value. Often that’s measured in the physical thickness of 'techno-grime', because only once a piece of gear has that semi-permanent smear of skin oils caked around the rotary controls can we truly assess its worth.

TechBid

An education in this sort of thinking is available monthly at the venerable equipment auction site TechBid, which exists as an online auction for film and TV gear whose usefulness tank has not quite yet run dry. Similar things exist worldwide, but TechBid, while it advertises worldwide shipping, is the local option for those of us in southeast England.

To be fair, much of what’s on offer is far less interesting than I might have implied so far. At the time of writing, an apparently mint condition HDCAM-SR VTR was bidding up through £755, and that’s almost a current piece of equipment. At the same time, though, not one, but two intercom control panels were on offer – yes, just the panels, raising valid questions about what’s happened to the rest of what must have once been a fairly large pile of associated gear.

An Arri 1000W True Blue T1 fresnel. Nearly £800 new, but could be yours for a tiny fraction of that in an auction. Image: Arri.

Retro-procrastination

There’s a certain quiet joy in making this sort of discovery whilst browsing TechBid over a lunchtime coffee. Some of us might not know what a Radamec 431 head is, for instance, but somehow, there’s a power supply for one listed with an attractive starting bid of £15. Overall, the lots tend to break down into one of three broad categories: comprehensible (“Sony SRW-5100/2 HDCAM-SR deck”), incomprehensible (“Bradley Engineeering Interface Box”) and huh? (“E-Scooter NEW/BOXED: 25km/h, 8.5in tyres, 16NM, 250W Motor. Max instant power: 5”)

At its best, TechBid isn’t an only an auction site. It’s also a drinking game: knock back a double every time you can’t describe what something does. Creative lying is allowed – after all, what sort of parvenu doesn’t know about the EVS XT2 COHX Codec Board For XT2 [HD].

It’s possible – and doubtless the intention - that some people might be perusing the site for that unobtainium spare part or a replacement for a favourite piece of kit that’s long out of production. It’d be just as easy, though, to believe that someone’s getting creative with this stuff, and one day soon there’ll be an Etsy site selling an occasional table made out of a Snell and Wilcox CVR22 standards converter. A reminder of a late, great British company, and a humming, blinking place to rest your coffee all at the same time.

It is, actually, useful

But OK. Poke fun as we might, this sort of thing has a purpose. The lots seem competently curated – there’s never any real dross, just the figurative contents of an industry’s attic. Since tungsten lights still work, a recently graduated film student might do better to buy that Arri 1K over some ultra-low-rent LED option which offers neither colour quality nor brand recognition. It’s also a shockingly affordable place to get pelican cases – the cases always sell – though prepare for an evening with a bottle of thinners, cleaning off the cargo handling stickers of a dozen airlines. Or leave them alone – it’s history. Some of that grit in there probably came from Africa.

Better yet, your narrator bought a Vinten Vision 3 tripod from a TechBid-like place in about the year 2000, when that tripod was already far from new, and had a broken latch replaced for free by Vinten in the 2010s. The company insisted on having it in for an overhaul, and they sent out a loaner while it was being done. PAG provided spare parts for free on a long-since-obsolete battery charger purchased from TechBid. There is something to be said about real gear, no matter the vintage, and the likes of TechBid are probably a more reliable place to get it than the bigger names in online auctions.

So, if you want a lump of almost-obsolete electronics that’s haunted by the memory of an enormous initial price tag, you now know where to get it. Scrape off the history with a spatula and some harsh solvents, mallet the case back into shape, and you, too, can be the proud owner of a (all together now) “Cavena Impress SDI unit for Cavena SDI subtitle keyers and teletext inserter”. Who doesn’t want an SDI unit for their Cavena subtitle keyer? Well, someone does, because it’s bidding up. In fact, they’ve got two, and they’re both bidding up.

Just remember that at one point, someone in their best suit was standing in front of a crowd of technology journalists gesturing at a projection screen with an attractively toplit picture of the Cavena Impress SDI unit with the dust motes photoshopped away, extolling its virtues, and now it can be yours for pocket money, complete with free gouges in the front panel.

Puts things in perspective, doesn’t it?