Stay tuned. More on this soon, and it won't be about the system being closed.
Michael
Let's hope the news is about the Rolleiflex and the Phase folks are making HY6 adapters as we speak.
To some extent these are tools, but on the higher end, when a camera and back is minimum twice the price of a Nikon or Canon, these cameras fall more into the want than need catagory.
The strangest thing about all of this is if you made a check list of what a photographer wants from a camera system I don't think you would end up with what we have today.
Who would have thought that in the high end of professional cameras no Zeiss lenses, or the name Rolleiflex would be replaced with a private label. Who would have dreamed that Hasselblad would outsource to Fuji or when all the digital shakeup is completed one of the few cameras left standing would have been a Mamiya 645 and the tilt shift lenses would be rebadged from the Ukraine?
Does anyone actually lust over a Mamiya 645?
Imacon/Hasselblad is lucky because they still have that famous logo and regardless of what anyone says, where things are made, how much they cost, the logo means something.
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It's the HY6, AFI. that confuses me. It is in the lust category, but instead of just calling the thing Rolleiflex, painting it in beautiful black, offering a wide angle lens and making a clear statement of what this camera does, to this day it is still confusing. Can you get a 90 degree prism, can you rotate a digital back on this camera without disconnecting, how many lenses are available in autofocus and the big one, can/will this camera show up in rental? Obviously if I can post these questions others have also so somehow, somebody missed the chance to put this camera out there with a lot of resource.
I assume it's a money decision, but since none of these companies write in clear speak, who knows?
People cried when Contax went belly up, but with just a few slight changes the HY6 Rolleiflex could be THE professional camera, though instead Phase options the 1,000 horsepower Mamiya.
It's not that the Mamiya 645 is a bad camera, it's not, it's competent, the "prior" versions were reasonable in price, but when I look at that photo of the AFD it doesn't look that much different than all of the other dslrs I have in cases and when you drop many tens of thousands of dollars on cameras, you want to unzip that case and see it glow like the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. Especially when you start talking price in the $45,000 range.
Since the start of digital capture the tail started wagging the dog. It's as if Shell and Exxon bought all the car companies, (actually I guess today they probably could) and started rebranding them.
If the car companies were like medium format cameras then the Shell Jaguar would only work well with Shell gasoline, the Exxon Porsche would . . . . . . well you get the idea.
Has any driver ever lusted over a brand of petroleum?
To me, Nikon, Canon and Sony get it. They understand that a digital camera should still look like a camera, act like a camera and function like one. They give you an LCD that actually does replace a polaroid, will shoot without 350 lbs of computer tagging along and have file formats that works at any "lab". Sony even knows that Zeiss carries some weight and I don't think anyone can discount what any of these three companies can do if they set their mind and wallets to it.