You can thank the marketing geniuses. You can bet they will be talking a lot about how this camera has three AF points compared to the competition's one. Even if the feature seems effectively useless.
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Your may be under the false impression that these companies have large marketing departments, or for that matter have any marketing past one or two people.
Also don't think that anybody in these marketing "departments" tries to lie or even gets close to fibbing. They advertise the best attributes of their cameras and hope it goes noticed.
In fact if you've talked to any of the medium format companies R+D people you will find the same passion for improving the product that most of us have for improving our photography.
We all want more use from a camera, we all want more information, but it's easy (I've done this also) to complain about medium format without knowing the realities of the size of these companies.
Let's get real, medium format may be expensive, but it does exist and for that I'm glad, actually amazed.
Really, it's not that expensive. When you think each time you push a button you get a drum scanned image, it's quite amazing.
Photographers can be (to put it kindly) "thrifty" and especially "thrifty" when it comes to the buy in on equipment. It also fascinates me to see someone drive a $55,000 car, but owns no lights, not cameras, no grip and then complains about the costs.
Still, there is an effort from Mamiya, Hasselblad and Sinar and I appreciate it and don't for a moment think that if Mamiya and Phase can add more lenses, more features and keep the price below both of the compeitors H cameras then that will be good for our industry including Leaf and Sinar.
You have to also recognize that this is the only new camera that has a focal plane shutter which allows for a lot of different glass, and I like focal plane shutters.
Not to defend the Phase/Mamiya, because I haven't seen one yet, but even if the focus points are clustered close, 3 AF points are better than one. Heck if the Nikon D3 which has great autofocusing has most of the focusing points clustered in the center of the frame.
JR