i would hope that the other TS lens that Phase is designing is better than slapping some lipstick on that Hartblei Sputnik pig. someone showed me that lens once, and i've never seen anything harder to manipulate than that lens. and even under the best of conditions, in studio with strobe, we're not talking about zeiss quality. for phase to wade into fred sanford territory, and start mining the junkpile for scrap lenses just does not speak well for their judgement. let that lens die, unless you're going for impressionism, or you're shooting barbara walters and need to kill the sharpness. can't wait to see the phase samples from this one: $42 thousand dollars, and sixty megapixels of total and absolute mush. one step forward, and two steps backwards.
and for the record, can anyone explain the enthusiasm for mounting any tilt lens on a fixed-back camera? i could see an architectural guy getting excited about a lens like that, if the back would also move too, but at best, the gains with using a TS lens with a fixed back camera seem limited. it seems to me, the best you'd expect would be the "stop it down to f22 and just hope i could carry focus deep enough into the frame where the client won't notice i'm not shooting a view camera", which seems half-hearted at best, for a real professional. as anyone who's shot a lot of jobs knows, there's nailing the focus, and then there's trying to carry focus; which are really two different things. there's sharp, and then there's almost sharp.
i guess there is the stitching crowd out there too, that don't need to tilt, but it would seem that that Really Right Stuff pano thing would be better than that Hartblei mess. Find the nodal point of each (great) lens that you already own, and stitch away, at much higher quality.
