With an August 2009 delivery goal, I doubt any price now would be worthwhile for many reasons.
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Before every photokina the process has always been a flurry of press releases, then during the show a new batch of new press releases about strategic alliances with not a lot of new working product being shown, then months go by and the answer is check with your dealer who will give you a lot of second hand information about what, when, where, how much, how soon, etc. etc. etc.
Then the airwaves go dead for a few more months.
If Photokina got you hot to buy, you couldn't get most of it today though I'm sure everybody will take a "deposit".
What a wasted sales effort.
I get the impression that Photokina is just a place all the makers and dealers meet to cut deals and except for hasselblad, the only deals anyone cuts is with each other. I think they'd sell more product if they thought about cutting those deals to the end user. Maybe Hasselblad is on to something, but knowing the world of medium format the competition will probably just repsond by making a new series of e-mail blasts and pdfs.
It's like a celebrity photo shoot where the photographer, makeup artist, hair stylist and subject are all the stars. Everybody tosses out names, talks about the "industry" says how fab everything is but at the end of the day, they forget they are selling bras, jeans, or shoes.
The process IS the event and becomes more important than selling the actual product.
Consequently Saturday I was at a small sized camera dealer, (I'm talking a one counter store) and it was packed with people buying Nikon D300's and lenses. And not just the cheap lenses either, but those new Nikon zooms and the 200 F2. Every person was leaving with gold boxes under their arms and if the Canon 5d2 was for sale I'm sure their would have been just as many black boxes going out the door.
If this is a down economy you wouldn't know it by watching the activity in this small store.
One of the customers was a ceo of a large corporation and and it didn't seem money was an issue. He asked about the Leica and the dealer just said it's not available for at least a year, he asked about the hasselblad and the dealer said they don't carry them. I doubt if he knows the name Phase, Sinar or Leaf. So he bought a D3 and a bunch of lenses and he did this in about 10 minutes. About $18,000 in ten minutes.
JR