Theodoros,
You are probably the only person around thinking that Hassy is seriously targeting the pro video market, how often have you been right in the past in such cases?
I may be wrong but I don't remember any of your far flegged previous forecasts turning into a reality... why should we believe you this time around?
Cheers,
Bernard
Bernard,
I too think that Hassy is testing the waters, at the very least for fashion use. Everybody is now working with video, lights are often continuous, and capturing an image in video and publishing on the web at least in short clips is becoming popular.
Also Hassy's "gadgets" in the past have mostly been useful features - look at the shutter delay, TrueFocus and Multi-shot, the vertical finder. None is a core feature for most studio photographers, but each has a set of afficcionados for who whom they are important.
If I may make a personal observation, I believe you are now seeing Hassy as a japanese company, aggregating zillions of features cranked out by dedicated employees, overwhelming the customer with useless functionality, in a product made to have a sales life of a year at most. With submodels packaged in different casings.
European design as epitomised by the Scandinavian school tends to be a carefully planned process, leading to a spare but effective product doing exactly the minimum but doing it well, with longer product cycles, and reusing the same casings for submodels The Leica rangefinder and the Hasselblad V series have had a good run for their money, as did the Volkswagen Beetle or the french Deux Chevaux. The advantage of the japanese method is that the product can be revised and evolved to keep the most useful features so it keeps getting better. The advantage of the european method is that you need fewer designers and production engineers, as you don't need to revise your tooling so often.
If Hassy are expending the huge engineering effort needed for video, they have some major reason for doing so. Video and especially RAW VIDEO (!) which they are doing is horribly hard, it heats your sensor, requires huge bandwidth, everything goes critically realtime. Video is not a minor feature, it is a characteristic which forces one to upsize all the system electronics, buses, storage media interfaces, and imposes real-time software engineering constraints.
BTW I remember talking to ex Hassy CEO Christian Poulsen at the H launch and I asked him why they didn't have a vertical finder; and he looked at me and simply said "we don't have the money to develop it at the moment". Development resources are often considered VERY scarce in European companies, and only allocated when needed. Because when a feature is integrated, it needs to be done well the first time round. Hassy is not doing video just to tick a box on the specs.
If you look at my prediction record, I think you will find that it is as good as that of any other industry insider, even though I never violate an NDA
Edmund
