Hasselblad lenses for the E-mount system?

[pakodominguez]

http://www.dpreview.com/news/2012/09/18 ... rship-dslr
Right now, just a Hasselblad body (a NEX7 re-design)



photos from http://www.quesabesde.com/noticias/hass ... ony,1_9115

[picman]

This has got to be the absolute ugliest most stupid camera I have ever seen. April 1 is too far away unfortunately.

[Dusty]

Hasselblad is just doing this to get Carl Zeiss glass back onto bodies with their name on them. Their current line-up of lenses are all Fujis!

Can't see the reasoning behind this, but Leica makes a fortune off of boutique cameras.

Dusty

[jeep1]

Hasselblad is just doing this to get Carl Zeiss glass back onto bodies with their name on them. Their current line-up of lenses are all Fujis!

Can't see the reasoning behind this, but Leica makes a fortune off of boutique cameras.

Dusty

Yes but Leica cameras look good, these are simply hideous, have they been built by a custom car body shop?

[artington]

Very fin de siecle idea - extremely vulgar. And those two control wheels look like they come off a 1970s era electric guitar

[pakodominguez]

Zeiss also jump into the system with a 12mm f2.8, 32 mm f1.8 and 50mm f2.8 macro.
http://blogs.zeiss.com/photo/en/?p=2864

[peterottaway]

Well I'm going to commit heresy against the photographic version of the cashmere,cultured pearls and blue rinse set. I see nothing wrong with the concept of Hasselblad going with either the A-mount or E-mount but as always the devil will be in the details so shall we wait and see shall we ?

Of course to those who detest the directions that Sony is taking their cameras a negative reaction is to be expected to anything that would give market or technological credence to their design decisions. To others who inside the Canikon "industry" in its broadest sense who are beginning to be uncomfortable about Sony ,this again is something they didn't want to hear.

I take it that Hasselblad has been very hard at work on looking at their financial future and decided that just a little tweaking would not be enough to ensure a decent future. The high end FF market is both eating into the prices of the medium format market but their sales as well - something has to change. Personally I would be surprised if the cameras produced look like some of the design concepts, my initial reaction to them was that I didn't realize that LSD was the drug of choice amongst the Nordic design set.

Although the Hasselblad 500 look does not translate directly to the DSLR or mirrorless market I would expect Hasselblad to try very hard to retain their " House Brand " just as Leica , Rolls Royce and Mercedes Benz does. And lets face it unlike Leica and Rolls Royce, Hasselblad is still requarded in the photographic market place as a working company and not a designer label. And I would expect them to continue to offer their own system software whether this is an in house effort or somewhat contracted out.

Fuji may be a decent partner to help design and manufacture a few thousand medium format cameras a year, but they are not a premium technology company. Fuji may have so far avoided what has befallen Olympus and Pentax but they are at best a niche player. I have been underwhelmed by their X series of cameras so far and the XPro in particular although they seem to be working out where they need to be and ironing out some of their problems. Yes SOME good lenses but they have had real problems into getting from design concept to the real world at acceptable prices.

[Dusty]

I still don't see it. Hassy will buy the kit from Sony, and put it together themselves, so there MAY be a bit better QC, but since most of the parts will be made in China, I'm not holding my breath.

If they design their own FF Alpha mount OVF body, it will either have a Hassy flash system on it or then new/old ISO ISO hot shoe, so we again fragment the system. Maybe with a flash adapter it would be nice for those of us that don't want the EVF, but at what price? If I'm paying $6K+ for a body, I'd rather go with 2 Nikon D800s, plus have more MPs.

Also, how often do you think Hassy will update their systems, if they're not just knock-offs of the Sony. You think Sony was slow with the a700 replacement? What about Hasselblad replacing an H900 with a newer, high MP version. Unless they somehow build a system with replaceable backs, you'll get the 30 MP version when the D900 comes out with 48 MPs at a $2800 price point.

The Sony balance sheets next year will show that they've sold 2000 NEX kits to Hasleblad, and don't expect another order for 3 more years.

Dusty

[peterottaway]

I think they will sell at least as many as Leica will sell M's given that Leica will not be alone in the market. But as Sony will be doing the heavy lifting then Hasselblad will only need to apply the final finish. The actual body may stay for a number of years but that doesn't mean the electronics will. Think Minolta body for the Leica R.

And looking at the announced CZ glass the lenses will only cost 25% of what Leica is asking. So that anyone inspired to actually use it as a camera won't have to pay as much.

On a different note if you look at the announcement you will see that Hasselblad talk about an APS camera with 25 AF points. That is not the current Nex7 or A77 it may not be exactly what the 2013 Sonys will be either if Hasselblad don't choose to use AF-D and the 102 focus points. Or whatever it will be on next years Sony offering. It will be no great loss to Sony to let Hasselblad be first to market given all the likely publicity.

[peterottaway]

Just a quick question. How many millions worth of advertising for Hasselblad over its announcement ?

[artington]

http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.co.uk/ ... ience+Lab)

[Greg Beetham]

If you retain the idea that the NEX line is basically a ‘film’ back with some knobs on with which and armed with a suitable adaptor you can use old lenses you might have lying around (with various degrees of difficulty), depending on just how useful the particular adaptor is and how un-electronic the particular lenses are.
I don’t know much about how legacy Hasselblad lenses work, some or most had a leaf shutter I think, probably much like the Bronica maybe, and some camera bodies had a selectable FP shutter as well I think…like I say my experience with Hasselblad is almost zero but the current idea of putting a horrible Hasselblad ‘skin’ on a NEX is ridiculous. Really the only thing that might save Hasselblad (after reading that excellent insight by Kirk Tuck) is for one of the partners to work on an adaptor for legacy Hasselblad lenses, one that will make the most of the leaf shutter and aperture control interface.
The other partner, or conjointly, (maybe Sony should be in charge of styling, they certainly will be building the sensor) should design and build an MF NEX body with a 6X6 sensor in it 24Mp or 36Mp whatever. It doesn’t matter that the NEX MF body won’t be small because it’ll still be a lot smaller and lighter than a regular MF body. With manual focus peaking (and this one should also have a tilt/swivel screen) Hasselblad could take advantage of their large legacy lens base, provided the adaptor works well and they don’t go stupid with pricing they should really clean Leica’s clock I think.
Greg

[pakodominguez]

FYI DK approach to the subject
http://www.photoclubalpha.com/2012/09/1 ... asselblad/

[Dusty]

Actually, Greg, you're on to something. Imagine a classic Hassy bod with the old Zeiss glass, square format sensor of around 40 -50 MP's (just scaling up a 10 or 12 MP FF sensor will do that, can't be too hard!).

Instead of the glass waist level finder, a large LCD screen that will flip up onto the top in it's place for waist level or be on the back for NEX/P&S type shooting. Since a prism finder was an option on the old Hassys, an optional EVF can give you traditional eyepoint shooting.

That way you have all the advantages of the old Hassy system, MF, Zeiss glass, square format, way larger 'negatives', along with modern digital photo shooting. Since old MF shooters are used to setting their own focus and apertures, I'm sure that won't be a problem for them, still. We seem to have gotten so d*mn lazy that we can't do that anymore!

Dusty

[Dr. Harout]

Just thinking loudly: is it possible that future FF NEX will be under Hasselblad name, while other APS-C ones under true NEX?