Since I've been looking into H3D-II 39 and posting a lot of H3D related questions, Greg Hollmann
of Hasselblad was nice enough to send me information about a one day event called "Hasselblad University" that was taking place in
Orange County yesterday and in LA today.
I attended the first half of the Tuesday session and planned to, but was unable to attend the second half in LA today.
I also had a chance to meet a few Hass reps at a local Calumet store on Monday for a few hours of Q and A.
The Hasselblad representatives were all pretty knowledgeable and I was able to get most of my questions answered - especially during the informal meeting on Monday. In class, each one of us had an H3DII camera to play with (mostly the 50Mp models), but the class material itself seemed very basic.
Walking through the menus of the camera and the very basic functions on Phocus software. Even I (who only used a rental for three days),
was mostly familiar with these functions - I can not imagine this being very useful for any of the current camera users... Of course, I missed
the second part of the class, but according to the syllabus it looked like it was going to be continuing along the same path...
My understanding is that this workshop was originally intended for studio techs assisting photographers, but instead
the class consisted of current and perspective Hasselblad users.
Still - I enjoyed talking to the reps and some of the other Hasselblad users were able to share a little bit of their personal experience with the cameras...
There was also a full line up of current Hasselblad lenses to check out...
I also wish the representatives did not stick so strictly to the official party lines in handling some of the questions.
-regarding ISO 50 being the only true ISO - they definitely knew what I was talking about and did admit to the higher ISO's being software manipulations.
But they also claimed that it works far better than postproduction manipulations. This is probably true to some extent.
-regarding limited shutter speed range of 1/800 to 30. They seemed set that 99% of the people do not need to go beyond that in 99% of the cases
and that the benefits of high sync speed far outweigh the limited shutter speed limitations... I guess this will depend particular user.
-regarding low quality of the LCD screen compared to even cheap DSLR's - same response I've heard about before -
something to do with the low number of cameras being produced. I do not buy it.
I'm sure most users would easily pay several hundreds of dollars more for a better LCD. They also mentioned LCD's not
being all that important anyhow - I also do not buy this. If reviewing an image is not important, why ever bother shooting tethered?
Overall, despite these minor issues, this was a nice event - both fun and educational.
Also, at least one of the demo cameras had an unreleased firmware which allowed shutter speed to go up to a little over 1 minute. Hasselblad guys clearly were not trying to hide this fact, but could not say when this firmware was going to be released.
-ilya
