I've had relatively little hands-on experience with a Bronica camera, but your description already makes me regret their passing.
Steve Hendrix
Years ago the Bronica/Tamron people contacted me, but I kind of realized it was a camera line that did not have any money development. Contax was then the darling of the 645 world with autofocus, a few people tried the Pentax and the H-1 was on the horizon.
I asked about Bronica making autofocus and they said it couldn't be done with leaf shutter lenses. Obviously Hasselblad proved them wrong.
I look at those cameras sometimes when we move stuff around in storage and I feel a slight twinge of sadness that they are dormant, but what's done is done and there is no going back.
I think in some ways we all lost out when digital came about, especially for medium format. At the time few people could understand a $30,000 "digital film back", fewer still could understand why if you bought a back for a Mamiya it wouldn't work on any other camera.
Costs and usability really hurt medium format and I believe that if a camera like the $13,900 H4 was around at the time of the first 1ds, Canon would not have grabbed most professional photographers, though the real nail in the coffin was how quickly the wedding guys adopted digital.
That had to take a big bite out of the medium format world.
I believe that if digital backs had been priced like the Kodak DCS backs, had a functioning lcd, a real usable 800 iso and easily worked on any camera platform a lot of the now defunct medium format cameras would still be going strong and still be developed.
But most people have to keep in mind that during the early days of digital, most successful photographers, labs and clients only viewed digital as a passing fad. Maybe Apple and Canon could see the future, but I don't think anyone really believed the transition to digital capture would happen as quickly as it did.
It seems like one day we were shooting film, the next day we were all trying to find a way to process out 5,000 files and understand color space, profiles and monitor calibration.
But the past is just the past and the only way to go is to move forward, though our options are less than they were, the professional nature of digital has improved.
Now I'm working RED files for dailies and it reminds me so much of the early days of digital stills The software is buggy, the files are great, the workflow is all over the place and like stills it seems like there will never be a standard, but I'm sure like stills, almost overnight film will go away in a heartbeat and the cinema guys will be buying hard drives like cheap bottled water.
When it comes, it comes quickly.
IMO
BC