Microsoft and P1 are already in a strategic partnership and have been since last year. But as for Microsoft buying P1 I think is a huge steaming pile of bs.
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If you talk to the Phase people you will hear a lot of careful information about their alliance with microsoft, but as far as MS owning the company, that didn't happen.
Also if anyone thinks Phase, Leaf, Sinar, or Hasselblad would ever do a deal to go away from the apple platform, they're not thinking too clearly, because we all know that the majority of the imaging world is working on a mac.
Actually what most of us hear is speculative, or second hand at best and I think we all have to be careful about what we post.
Even if we hear it directly from the CEO in today's business world anything can change in a heartbeat. Who would have ever thought that Jaguar and Land Rover would be owned by a company based in India, so I try to take all of this with a grain of salt and worry more about what I'm doing than what a camera manufacturer might or might not do in the future.
With medium format these are small companies, though larger than most of our studios rumors can do a lot of damage. Imagine a thread that mentioned your name with the heading Joe Blow Photography . . . is he closing?.
With the web, that sentence immediatly becomes part of the google public domian and probably comes up everytime somebody types in Joe Blow.
I use a lot of digital cameras and backs and have owned even more. What I use now works for me very well, others for my style of shooting did not, but regardless of what I use, or how much I like the people that work at those companies, I don't wish any of the other brands anything but success.
As a professional, our choices for a long period were getting smaller by the month and now we see in medium format new cameras and backs, in dslrs, new full frame offerings and from my standpoint all of this is not just good, it's great, as options allow all of us to explore new looks and hopefully produce an image we never thought previously possible.
In fact I'm very glad that these companies especially the medium format back makers still have the passion and desire to keep making solutions.
I also applaude Phase for putting their previous P series out there at discount. Nothing but good can come from increasing the user base of medium format. It also provides the photographer with a lower cost backup solution, something that medium format needed to address for a long time.
These are other forums are full of the one camera fits all syndrome with constant battles of the Canon will perform the same as a medium format back, or the medium format backs are much superior to any dslr.
In reality all of them, even specfic to the actual brand work differently in capture, intermediate processing down to the final fiinsh of the file and owning 4 brands of digital capture devices, enough lenses to fill up a closet has only proven to me that one camera just can't do everything I want it to do.
I travel a great deal and at times carrying all this equipment makes me wish for a one brand one camera system, but then when I step back and think about it, for most professional photographers one camera, lens, film size never covered all the territories and I doubt if it ever will.
James Russell
