has anyone used digital rev?

D.P. said:
It isn't so much a "I buy British" feeling, it is a "I pay the legal taxes on the purchases I make".

TBH, if you can't justify the 20% taxes hat you are illegally avoiding then the simply solution is just buy camera gear that is 20% less expensive.
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id still know that camera could be had for 20% less!
i blame my mum, she always wanted a bargain!

i do think its great some people will buy in the uk etc but i just cant see it as anything else but wasting money
 
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The thing is, you make it sound like because somebody bought something as a grey import that they are some kind of lifetime tax defrauder/dodger who is a criminal, destroying the country.

That's simply ludicrous, even more so implying its the same as buying stolen goods.
I pay tax on my earnings, I paid for my university education and I've also never claimed anything from the state in my life. Are you telling me that whenever you have been away somewhere you always go through the red channel and declare to customs what you have spent?

There is only so far you can go with supporting high-street stores as well. For example, in the past week, my own experiences of such camera retailers:

- Calumet - Waited over 30 minutes for a staff member to be free, got fed up waiting and took my business elsewhere.

- Independent - More expensive than anywhere else, wouldn't remotely budge on the price.

- Jessops - Ordered via the Click & Collect service, yet it didn't arrive on the day it was supposed to. When I eventually had a call to say it had arrived, I had to wait 15 minutes for a member of staff to be free to serve me. They then had to find my resevation and had messed it up with somebody else's. Pretty lame when I was spending nearly 2k on a lens.

Its the likes of Amazon that are killing the high street, which is hardly without controversy given how they route their taxes through Luxembourg. You only have to look at the plethora of bargain basement pound shops popping up through out the country in the wake of former chains and independents to see how frivolous people are with their money and making sure they get the best for it.
 
The tax avoidance issue is hard to ignore. But we are in a strange, in-between state where the old, easily monitored bricks & mortar world and the new digital world are co-existing uncomfortably. And while it's easy to ignore taxes when you're buying something small, the more you're spending, the guiltier you (well, ok, I) feel about spending the money in the first place, and the easier it is to talk yourself into illicit bargain hunting.

I can semi-justify it to myself by looking at my shrinking pay packet (wrt inflation), or by the fact life's short and I can't solve our national debt on below average earnings. But ultimately it is stealing from yourself, because we all suffer from the consequences of a reduced tax base. However after waiting 5 months for the NHS gears to grind their way towards allowing me an MRI to find out why I'm unable to stand up, walk, or work without pain, despite keeping the co-codamol suppliers in business, I'm tempted to see this as a way of recouping some of the £300+ I've wasted on an osteopath.

Whether I will order a camera from abroad or not will depend largely upon whether I ever get fixed. I don't need a 70D to take pictures of my short hobble to work and back. :-) Personal circumstances don't alter the fact that tax evasion is a crime though. It's just not one an increasingly trans-national world has worked out how to deal with yet. That's a political problem as much as a personal one.

As for the high street issue... I turned 50 this year (which explains the knackered back), and bought my first camera when I was 18 after working hard for a summer. I bought mail order because I couldn't afford shop prices.

Over the years I've not bought huge amounts of equipment (I never had the money for large parts of that period!) but I've used various high street stores. I can't remember a single occasion when I felt the retailer knew more than I did on the kit I was looking for (even if they had stock), or when I felt I was going to be paying for genuinely useful service.

If anything, quite the opposite, leaving me with the impression that high street has always been for people with no knowledge and little interest in the hobby. I'm sure there are, or were, great independents out there, and individuals within chains who were real stars. But I never met any of them.

Perhaps if I'd been in a position to spend more money, or a Pro able to ignore prices because it's a business expense, I might have discovered better service and developed better relationships. But personally I think forums like this are as much to blame for the death of the high street as Amazon or Digital Rev. We have better collective knowledge than any store can offer, and we share our knowledge for free.

No shop can compete with that. So we are all part of the problem. :-)
 
Andrew_McP said:
The tax avoidance issue is hard to ignore. But we are in a strange, in-between state where the old, easily monitored bricks & mortar world and the new digital world are co-existing uncomfortably. And while it's easy to ignore taxes when you're buying something small, the more you're spending, the guiltier you (well, ok, I) feel about spending the money in the first place, and the easier it is to talk yourself into illicit bargain hunting.
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To expand a bit more, this sort of thing has always gone on (avoiding tax) but now you have the internet where users are more savvy with what information they can trust than before, whereas in years gone by you'd deal with some dodgy bloke down the market or in the pub, then you dealt in member only forums and people are so cocky these days thinking they'll never be caught (like d/l torrents, DC, filesharing) that they now openly gloat on forums that they've done it. Eventually this will be the downfall of the whole thing due to the arrogance of the sites and naivety of customers.

Soon enough you'll see world wide clamping down, probably in the form of the manufacturer refusing to cover any warranty if there isn't evidence of it being bought in the country you're submitting it from, or something similar. Also, how long will it be before HMRC are checking peoples forum accounts that are posting images of the items purchased for IPs etc to they can look at prosecuting people (realistically I can only see them bothering with sellers on this rather than buyers, but you never know)?

In the UK until HMRC aren't quite frankly a laughing stock, it'll continue. They're so under funded and staffed considering what they have to do, nothing will change.
 
al4x said:
they dont cover warranty already if you buy bodies abroad do they?
still worth the risk tbh
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They will effectively cover the warranty for you. So for example with Canon's 1 year warranty on bodies, during that time, if you need to make a claim you have two options:

- Send it to Canon UK, pay for whatever repair needs doing, then send the breakdown to Digital Rev and they should refund you.
- Send it back to Digital Rev who will then warranty it at Canon Hong Kong, then ship it back to you.

I've not really read much about anyone who has actually done either though, or exactly what the deal is with other equipment manufacturers. Although I did buy a body from them, its now past the one year warranty anyway.
 
VAT is an immoral regressive tax charged on essential items like food, clothes, utilities, increasing our living costs. Thus evading it via digitalrev et al is perfectly justified, it's essentially a rebate.

Looks like Werewolf hit the wrong button on the above post.
 
Just wanted to add to this thread.
I ordered a Fuji 55-200mm lens (£450, miles cheaper than anywhere else) on Sunday night, and it arrived Tuesday at 3pm.
40 Hours from Honk Hong to my door in the UK - that's despite the Christmas rush and the adverse weather too..really very impressive.

No obvious charges from DHL and the invoice stated 'Digital Camera, value £70' so I probably won't get any either. Useful indeed.
 
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