Medium Format Camera News

What is the appeal of "retro" photography? I mean, surely, hasn't everyone "gone digital" nowadays? And equally surely, wouldn't you admit that the three new ZV Classic lenses from Zeiss, for traditional Hasselblads, are as retro as they come?
The answer is no, on both counts.

First, film has no more been killed by digital than...

You'd think that with 12- and 16-megapixel digital SLRs so readily available that demand for digital backs and medium format digital bodies would be languishing. But 2007 looks like another good year for the big guns with both Rollei and Hasselblad showing very impressive new products, Pentax still showing a prototype digital body, and Phase One still doing very well...

This would appear to be a new golden age for rangefinder users. There are now three major systems (Leica, Voigtländer, and Zeiss) and two minor (Epson and Rollei). All use the same cross-compatible lens mount, for which an extensive and excellent range of lenses is available, and all compete with one another, albeit at different price points. Who could have imagined this...

Large format cameras, in the sense of "cameras that take large sheets of film," are ever rarer at photokina. There are still plenty of cameras, and sometimes (it seems) almost as many manufacturers, but because so many of the manufacturers are so tiny, making a few score cameras a year, they are known by word of mouth in the large format "fine art"...

Anyone who tells you medium format is dead hasn't seen the recent spate of products coming from all of the major players in the medium format market. If PMA is any indication at all, medium format digital is not only alive, it's thriving.

Hasselblad had the new H2D-39 on display in a private area. A solid digital update to the H1 system, the new version...

Do you love black and white photography? If so, does this sound like a dream camera to you: inexpensive, easy to use, forgiving, and capable of the finest results in the world? I thought it might. Welcome to the world of 5x7".

Inexpensive? Yes. The last 5x7 I considered, but didn't buy, was a twin-lens (!) on its own studio stand. It...

The Chinese-built, American-designed Fotoman 617 justifies itself as soon as you see the first transparencies on the light table. The huge format is a knockout. It's gorgeous. That vast slab of film is 21/4x62/3". That's 56x168mm, or over 11 times the area of 35mm.

It's ideal for scanning, too. Even a very modest flat-bed film scanner giving...