Best Photography Shop in the Bay Area

During my latest trip to the Bay Area, I had the opportunity to visit some photography shops to buy a reflex digital camera for my brother-in-law. I found totally different approaches and unfortunately I had to buy it where the price was lower, that’s was my goal. I say unfortunately because there was a much better place.

Here is the list of shop I visited:

Keeble&Shuchat, Palo Alto
Fry’s Electronics, Palo Alto
Calumet Photography, San Francisco
Adolph Gasser Photography

Keeble&Shuchat, Palo Alto
A pretty big store, with lots of cameras in stock and a great service. Definitely #1 in terms of service and support, praises to Mr Brad Lowman that took the time to show me different models and explaining pros and cons of each. Unfortunately price of the camera that I chose was $75 higher of the shop where I bought it, otherwise I would have bought it there, they really deserved it.

Fry’s Electronics, Palo Alto
Service very poor, but you can deal with it since it’s a mega store of electronics and not a specialized store in photography. I was going to buy there, but when it came to pay, I discovered they didn’t accept American Express. What? Are you serious? You don’t accept Amex? Thumb down. They never saw me again.

Adolph Gasser Photography, San Francisco
Very poor service, high price. The bottom of my list of preferences. They just showed one model to me and the sales guy didn’t take the time to tell me more about other models. It seemed to me they wanted to quickly close the deal without loosing too much time. Bad.

Calumet Photography, San Francisco
Aside from the fact that the guy carefully read every page of my passport before let me pay, I bought the camera there because the lower price. Overall a good service and looks like a pretty big store with pro stuff. Great place.

At the end of the day, aside from the price (if I had to buy it for me, I would have chose that shop), my final choice is Keeble&Shuchat. The support I had was really helpful and it will definitely be the shop where I could buy, hopefully, my next camera. If you go there, you can bet you’ll get a great service and an outstanding support after you bought your camera.

Any thought? What’s your experience? Did I miss some great shops (lack of time) ?

adolph gasser, calumet photography, keeble&shuchat, luca filigheddu, photography