I rented my car before I bought it. ..........snio..........Due diligence has it's rewards.
Where's the fun in that?
I think what most people are asking here is simple . . . is the RZ still being manufactured?
Anyway, In commercial image making today . . . it's about concept, style, how/what/when you deliver, low on set drama, relationships and of course costs.
How this relates to cameras is everyone's personal preference. If a photographer loves his/her RZ,D,B,C AFD one two or three, Hasselblad H 30, 40, 50, 60, a still or video camera, etc. etc. then great, go with it because if the camera makes you feel good then you might shoot a little better, but overall at the end of the day nobody a photographer wants to work with talks about cameras or really cares.
They say it's the economy stupid, but in image making it's the idea, the execution, the creativity. Today more than ever because the world of presentation, media has been so democratized that only an outstanding idea will survive the glut of data that flies at us by the second.
There was a period where I thought God help us if it becomes a 5d world, but today, I see the camera choices "I" make as liberating because as good as cameras are from $3,000 to $30,000 and the small differences the camera makes in the final image, photography is now more of a level playing field than anytime in the history of the profession, which should allow great IDEAS to spew out like water.
Now we can shoot about anything, anywhere, anytime and what will make the difference in what you produce is not the logo on the camera, but what resides between your ears and your ability to get it shown.
For anybody starting out or struggling to go forward they should remember that even 10 hours of thought and resource put into a camera choice and learning curve is 10 hours they didn't spend on concept, style, how/what/when you deliver, relationships and of course costs.
Today, in the commercial world, it's all about having everything in the proper priority.
This spot for Levi's by Weiden, illustrates that better than anything I can write It could have been shot with a $300,000 panaflex or a $3,000 5d2. It's all about the ideas and the final execution. It's not about pixels, RZ's or micro detail.
Everybody keeps telling me the good ol' days are gone, but if artists open their minds to the possibilities before us, we can produce imagery that we never dreamed of before, with almost any equipment.*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=635XItRDU7g...player_embeddedIMO
BC
*note. Obviously this spot costs money and probably had large crew, but the ideas, the style, the core message is the creativity.