I was excited by this announcement. Still am, in fact. The lack of in-camera live view was holding me back, in spite of owning a bunch of H-series lenses. But I'm a little worried. I own an Imacon Precision II scanner. It has a SCSI interface, now obsolete. When Imacon came out with the Precision III, which had a FireWire interface in addition to higher resolution, they offered an upgrade to the Precision III to Precision II customers.
I bit.
The kit consisted of a firmware upgrade, a third-party FireWire to SCSI converter, and a stick-on rubber thingy with a “III” on it to go over the “II” on the scanner. Since I’d paid a couple of thousand bucks for the upgrade, I wasn’t very happy. It seemed like the only thing of value was the firmware upgrade.
Years later, I realized what a truly lousy deal it was. Imacon stopped supporting the SCSI-based scanners in their new software. But I was covered, right? Nope. They still supported real Flextight Precision III’s, but not Precision II’s that had been made into Precision III’s through their upgrade process. They froze the driver for my scanner at a version that ran on Windows XP, but on no newer operating system.
Now Windows XP is riding off into the sunset.
If I had a Mac, I'd be fine, right? Well, no. It turns out that the SCSI scanners aren't supported on Intel-based Macs.
My $17 kilobuck scanner is slowly turning into a doorstop.
Which brings me to FireWire. That's the only interface that the H5D-xxx supports. No USB-3. No GBE. It's hard to find FireWire machines new these days, although you can get there with a Thunderbolt adapter. However, it's not obvious that Thunderbolt is going to catch on in the PC world, which is where i dwell most of the time.
Thus I'm on the fence. I'd hate to see a new Hasselblad head for doorstop-dom in a couple of years. Mebbe I should wait and see if a high-count FF sensor is around the corner.
Hmmm.
Jim