While here in China I have visited many, many of its great electronics malls and am more and more tempted to pick up a DSLR as they seem much cheaper than back home. Ive been looking at the Canon EOS 550D and the cheapest Ive found so far is around £500 for the body with 18-55mm lens kit and around £680 for the body with 18-135mm lens kit. As Ive not really looked at DSLRs before, can you guys tell me whether you would go for one of these for a first DSLR, whether these are good prices and which I should possibly go for?

While the cameras and pc components here are legit, one thing I wont be buying from these malls is a memory card for the camera as they are definitely not official. My gf bought what she was told was a 2gb sony usb mem stick, only to find it labelled as 16gb on the stick and unable to write more than about 500mb to it without it corrupting everything.

Other fake things Ive found in the malls include mice, keyboards, headphones (Beats by Dr. Dre for only £15, yeah right), handheld games consoles, phones (htc copies labelled up as hkc, as well as very badly photocopied iphone 4 boxes and bad copies of the phone) and many other things.

Im a canon fanboi myself but you might want to consider nikon, a mate of mine had one, similar price but has some nice extra fetures like wireless remote flash straight out of the box

Are you definitely sure theyre the real deal? A lot of cash to drop on something if youre even vaguely unsure Id say :/ Whats the deal with warranty etc if you buy out there?

Definitely real as there was a real Canon shop in Shanghai where we asked about buying from the malls and they said that there shouldnt be a problem.

The only thing they did say is to buy a Canon sealed box as some of the sellers replace the Canon lenses with cheap ones and just tape the boxes back up again, which I have seen done, but I have found a place here in Qingdao that only sell Canon sealed boxes.

Held off on buying the camera for a bit and glad I did. Just got to Beijing and been out to the electronics district here and its mental. There are a load of buildings, some 20 storeys tall, with every floor selling electronics, the first 8-10 floors are just showing off the goods, then you head up to the other floors to do deals and get your stuff. Thing is, here they are selling at wholesale prices so the cameras are the cheapest Ive seen so far, and every seller wants to beat the others prices.

There are people walking out of these buildings carrying stacks of mobile phones and cameras, serious money is being made here.

So far have a lowest price on the 550D with 18-55mm lens at £390 and lowest on the 550D with 18-135mm lens at £565. Also been looking at a 13" MacBook, and the cheapest elsewhere in china was £800? managed to get it down to £740 here, but they dont want to go lower.