There are other companies, besides Phase, who might be under pressure to do something -- if Kyocera owns the rights to Contax, but is not doing anything with them, that asset is quickly going to diminish in value as MF gets divided up. If they are going to do anything with those rights, it has to be soon -- and I don't see any possibility of anything being done with it, unless it's with Phase. There are simply no other players available -- the musical chairs have run out.
As for Phase making its own camera -- this may not necessarily be such a big problem (although perhaps I simply don't understand the problems.) To oversimplify, they basically need to build a light-tight box on the front of their backs, that would take lenses from any of the other manufacturers -- that is, the adaptor plate might not need to be on the back of the camera, but on the front. Is this completely off base?
As for Phase joining with Mamiya, this makes sense to me, if Mamiya really continues to exist in any real way. To make money here, Phase would have to accept a kind of culture shift -- it used to be that Mamiya was the studio workhorse (the RZs) and a second-line small MF (the 645s) -- and it made money. It might be able to do that again, but it would have to accept second line status: lenses and bodies that might not be the very best (although still very good), and a price point that is suitably lower. If they could knock 20 percent off the price of an Hy6 or a Hassy, they would probably do well.
There might be some real synergy -- good for everybody -- if Phase joined the Hy6 consortium. To know that you have a range of options for a given system would encourage people to buy it, especially given Hassy's recent behavior. And once a person bought any Hy6 back (with lenses) it's likely that any upgrades or back-changes would come within the available range of backs, rather than going outside to Hasselblad. So Phase's joining the consortium could be good for all of them.
Bernard, though, held up the other wild card -- the upcoming Nikon. There have been some suggestions that Nikon is cooking up something unusual, perhaps a modular camera that would accept different sensor formulations. This could wind up knocking the lower end out of the MF market.
Be interesting; I think we'll know what's going to happen (what will set the direction for the next few decades) by the fall of 2010.
JC
