Please feel free to point out any mistakes in information I post and refrain from these personal attacks.
Fred -
I am willing to clear the air. I will say that recently your posts have been more helpful in pointing out some very useful 35mm features (which I see are being cross posted on the 35mm forum). But you have had some posts in the past that I felt were unnecessarily provocative, so as to purposely paint medium format digital in a negative light. This has made it hard for me to trust your motivations.
If you read my posts, you will see that I spend most of my time hear providing information that is factually correct or indicated as accurate in our testing and in the context of our tremendous comparative experience with medium format digital backs, which covers many years and many more different products than just about anyone else on this forum, users or otherwise. You will have a difficult time finding a post that I have written where I attempt to portray a product in a negative light, or where I initiate the idea of question marks that are not grounded in actual results when it comes to choosing to use a product.
I feel that photographers, while some may see themselves as craftsman, others as artists, and others as a combination of attributes, are first and foremost individuals. And as individuals, they have their own subjective preferences for the tools they use to complete their task.
I highly respect those preferences. As a result, when someone questions the use of a tool for photography just in general, and continues to produce information that seems to be pushing them away from legitimate tools, I find that of questionable benefit to photographers.
So, when you took my data offering on ratios and blithely asked for my annual unit sales, I was suspicious of your motives. I wouldn't provide such data to anyone - certainly not on a public forum - and nothing is being hidden by not doing so. There's no great conspiracy for dealers
hiding their medium format sales numbers. The annual sales numbers for medium format worldwide have been in the 5k - 7k range for most of the past 10 years. I was rather shocked when Simon Harper stated his projection as 100 units worldwide for P1/Leaf. I will tell you the sales numbers from CI alone are way higher than that. But here is a respected and talented photographer posting a guess of 100 units worldwide. Perhaps he missed a zero. But such is the ease in which misinformation can be spread. I don't blame Simon at all, as I trust his track record as an honest advocate of whatever he is using or not, it was just a guess or a typo.
The fact is, photographers like to think they know all the other players. In reality, they do not. I've been told by a well known photographer that there are maybe 5 or 6 guys in the city he lives in who might shoot medium format, when in fact, we'd been selling more than that every year in that very same city (obviously to photographers he doesn't know, or doesn't know well).
If Simon asked me for my annual sales numbers, I wouldn't be offended and I would simply state that I respectfully decline to share those numbers. I don't have a reason to not trust Simon. Maybe you now have a different approach in contrast to some of your prior posts. If so, then I will try to keep that in mind going forward. You have some very positive insights into the practical use of cameras and I hope that those continue.
I hope that my frank explanation of my perspective on this issue is not considered an attack.
Steve Hendrix
Capture Integration