Arriving in November the NEW Sony PXW-FS5 (Body only) £4899 incl vat.
Pro video blog…Produced by Philip Johnston DoP/Editor
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The headline says the price of £4899 includes VAT, but down below it says “plus VAT”. Not sure which one is correct. Pretty amazing that it seems the UK price is $2K USD more.
HDW : Sorry I made a mistake on the bottom pricing it should have read incl vat. I am going to ask Sony why there is a $1878 price difference…shocking !
Don’t forget the VAT…
USA (B&H) price is showing as $5,599.00 for the FS5 (body only) …that’s ~£3,659 at todays (variable!) exchange rate of 1 GBP = ~1.53 USD ( http://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/convert/?Amount=5599&From=USD&To=GBP ).
Adding on the extra 20% VAT which we have to pay (but the Americans don’t!) gives ~£4,391 (~$6,718), to be more closely on par with the US price, so the overall USA(with 20% VAT added) to UK(including VAT) price differential is ~£508 (~$777).
H Preston’s quoted ‘Excluding VAT’ price of £4,082.50 converts to ~$6,246 so the UK ‘Including VAT’ price is effectively made up of a ~$647 (~£423) base-price differential ($6246 minus $5599) plus the extra 20% VAT on the total.
So we can’t blame Sony for the VAT element, but I’d be interested to know why there is a roughly (~11.6%) £423/$647 base-price (or £508/$777 including VAT) difference between the UK and USA prices?
The difference isn’t as much as the “$1878 price difference…shocking!” you mention, but still a substantial figure!
Anyone considering self-importing a USA camera needs to remember that shipping, Import Duty and VAT (on the total …yes, a Tax on a Tax!) will be payable, so allow about an extra 30% in costs to get the product into the UK (that includes second-hand goods too …as I found out when I bought a 20-odd year old Nikon lens from Florida!).
Add ~30% to the USA price of the FS5 body and you’re looking at ~£4,757 …fairly close to the UK price (before any dealer discounts kick in) so not much saving by self-importing (and questionable warranty support).
PS …leaving aside the obvious VAT element, perhaps some (or all?) of the base-price differential is due to the differences in Import Taxes applied to Japanese goods when imported to the USA versus EU.
Without knowing those Import Tax rates we can’t know if the apparent difference in price is down to Sony etc. or the relative Tax regimes of the USA and EU.
Also, we know EU imported ‘video cameras’ attract a higher rate of Import Tax than ‘stills cameras’. Hence many ‘stills cameras’ (that also shoot video!) have the video recording time limited to 29min 59sec in order to avoid being classed as ‘video cameras’ and thus attracting the higher rate of Import Tax. Many equivalent USA ‘stills cameras’ don’t have that video recording time limit so, presumably, there is no price penalty applied to ‘video cameras’ in the USA.
The recent announcement of a ‘Pacific Rim Trading Block’ (including Japan and USA) means the differences in pricing between the USA and EU may grow even larger in future years…?