I have to say that I do find this comment quite remarkable.
You're talking about a $5.5K lens here, yes?
Do people actually fall for this and buy the thing? They spend five and a half thousand bucks on a wide angle lens and then chop the edges off, resulting in an image that has the field of view of a 35mm?
Five. And. A. Half. Thousand. Dollars.
You have to wonder whether this lens exists purely to entice people into the wonderful world of tech-cams.
Phase One 28mm D Price is $5490. So yes, 5.5k.
It's quality and value proposition is entirely dependent on what you're doing and what you're comparing it to.
I think the $5.5k 28D, which covers full-frame 645, does very well in price and performance compared to other autofocus SLR medium format super-wides:
- $5.3k HCD28 (not compatible with full-frame 645)
- $9k S2 24mm (only compatible with 1.3 crop sensor)
- $5k Pentax 645 25mm (only tested with 1.3 crop sensor)
Compared to a Rodenstock 23HR, 28HR, or 32HR or Schneider 28XL or Schneider 35XL (manual focus, manual aperture, manual cocking) lenses the corners of any of these SLR lenses are not in the same ballpark.
If you're shooting fashion, portrait, wedding, editorial, event, street, or the many other genres in which super-sharp corners-of-the-frame are not critical then the autofocus, autoaperture, auto-metering, through the lens focus/composition of an SLR, will far outweigh the moderate dropoff of sharpness in the corners.
So no the lens does not "exists purely to entice people into the wonderful world of tech-cams". It's a great lens for many genres, shooters, and shooting styles. But I agree with you that for a tripod-based landscape shooter a 32HR or 28XL makes a better lens than a 28D.
Horses for courses; don't try to shoot a wedding with a 32HR
.