Why is Hasselblad so overrated?

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AgX

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Maybe the first "medium format" camera system? I think Exakta preceded them in 35mm (maybe Contax, too).
Rather Praktina. But yes, the Exakta was the first 35mm camera introduced into the scientific/medical world.
 

MamiyaBronica

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As I said in that other thread, I never heard cameras as such been related to dentists, let alone a Hasselblad as common saying.

I wish I could find it, but I'm pretty sure I read such a theory in the late 80s in either a magazine or a photography book. I wish I could find the exact quote. However, I seem to recall it was meant as a joke - and not a serious indicator of who bought those cameras. I also have a book from the 70's from Aaron Sussman which said something like "If you like, treat yourself to the Swedish Hasselblad...a camera that made it to the moon." and went on to describe the benefits of having a "system" camera. No mention of being a dentist.

Following up to my thoughts earlier in the thread, I asked a few people who I knew in the 90s who were pros with Hassels and all except for one leased them. The guy that didn't lease his bought his coming off someone else's lease at a discount.
 

Lachlan Young

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As I said in that other thread, I never heard cameras as such been related to dentists, let alone a Hasselblad as common saying.

Moreover, I always saw Hasselblads as cameras for commercial use, and read most of the respective advertizing in this way. All owners of Hasselblads I know are professional photographers, who kept it for sentimental reason.

Maybe I missed something back then, maybe the west-german situation was different from the US one. It would be interesting to have customer-related sales-figures. The photo sales guys I know are too young to know.

We got former sales guys here from both sides of the ocean, having sold to consumers and professionals, may be they know more about that.

It's probably referring to some dumbass (Vollpfosten?) thing Ken Rockwell claimed.
 

itsdoable

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...the Mamiya wide-angle TLR lenses are 'retrofocus', but not due to mirror-clearance requirements. The position of the light baffle, when raised, is the reason....
The reflex mirror is the reason for the retro-focus, you could not use a 38mm Biogon like lens for viewing, irrespective of the baffle or body shutter design.
 
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RalphLambrecht

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... or underrated?

Referring to a recent post elsewhere, it depends which dentist you ask.
Hasselblad is not really a camera;it is an extension of your arm, which you can use to make images. and if it doesn't work out,you can be sure that it wasn't because of the camera failing. It simply is the best MF camera around!
 

RalphLambrecht

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... or underrated?

Referring to a recent post elsewhere, it depends which dentist you ask.
Hasselblad is not really a camera;it is an extension of your arm, which you can use to make images. and if it doesn't work out,you can be sure that it wasn't because of the camera failing. It simply is the best MF camera around!
 

Neil Grant

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The reflex mirror is the reason for the retro-focus, you could not use a 38mm Biogon like lens for viewing, irrespective of the baffle or body shutter design.
...remember, the reflex mirror in a TLR doesn't move. The wide-angle lenses could have been designed to sit very close to it, but instead 'spare space' has been allowed for the baffle. As you say, a 38mm Biogon wouldn't work, but if they camera was designed slightly differently then maybe a 45mm wide-angle would have been possible. Or the existing 55/65mm lenses could have been less compromised optically by being designed for a shorter back-focus.
 

Sirius Glass

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Maybe the first "medium format" camera system? I think Exakta preceded them in 35mm (maybe Contax, too).

Yes, you are correct. I knew that, but I was thinking medium format. OTOH Hasselblad was in business much longer than Exakta.
 

lecarp

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When I saw the title of this thread I was immediately reminded of a joke told to me by an Irish friend.

Patrick came home form work early with a cough and a fever.
The wife tells him to go right back to work to the company Doctor and not come back till he had, and she yelled as he went out the door, DON'T STOP OFF AT THE PUB!
Some while later Patrick returns home with tattered clothes and a black eye.
The wife takes one look and accuses him of going to the pub instead of the doctor. Patrick replies, I went to the Doctor!
The wife asked, what happened to his face?
Patrick replies, he told me to piss in a bottle and I told him to shit in his hat, and the fight was on!
 

StepheKoontz

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The entire system was high in quality.
The cameras were well supported if you were a professional, including by leasing companies.
The square format and matched pro lab masking systems made it possible to be very efficient if you had a busy wedding and portrait business, or a busy mid-level commercial photography business.
The leaf shutter lenses made fill flash work a practical option, which in turn resulted in easy to print negatives that were easy to turn into pleasing and saleable prints.

That's it in a nutshell. These were designed as a tool for a professional market, and the "system", from preloading the film backs before an event to the finished saleable print, was seamless and repeatable with no surprises.
 

Wallendo

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As I said in that other thread, I never heard cameras as such been related to dentists, let alone a Hasselblad as common saying.

Moreover, I always saw Hasselblads as cameras for commercial use, and read most of the respective advertizing in this way. All owners of Hasselblads I know are professional photographers, who kept it for sentimental reason.

Maybe I missed something back then, maybe the west-german situation was different from the US one. It would be interesting to have customer-related sales-figures. The photo sales guys I know are too young to know.

We got former sales guys here from both sides of the ocean, having sold to consumers and professionals, may be they know more about that.
I suspect the dentist reference is related to long-running US TV ads for toothpaste which would included phrases like "4 out of 5 dentists agree" that a toothpaste ingredient was good. These ads ran in some sort for a couple of decades.
 

MamiyaBronica

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...remember, the reflex mirror in a TLR doesn't move. The wide-angle lenses could have been designed to sit very close to it, but instead 'spare space' has been allowed for the baffle. As you say, a 38mm Biogon wouldn't work, but if they camera was designed slightly differently then maybe a 45mm wide-angle would have been possible. Or the existing 55/65mm lenses could have been less compromised optically by being designed for a shorter back-focus.

Wasn't there a Biogon for the 'blad system which required you run it mirror-up with a sports-finder/external finder? Something that predated the SWC camera?
 

Lachlan Young

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That's it in a nutshell. These were designed as a tool for a professional market, and the "system", from preloading the film backs before an event to the finished saleable print, was seamless and repeatable with no surprises.

I think it was also envisaged as a system based evolution of the then-dominant Rolleiflex, incorporating the SLR operation of the Reflex Korelle, but in a form factor closer to the Rollei.
 
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Deleted member 88956

Personally I had never heard of Hasselblad dentist reference, so when I saw earlier today clear indications this was not all that uncommon, I found it funny. What better way to start talking about Hasselblad.

To be clear I never doubted engineering or capability of it, even if like everything else it isn't perfect, nor most robust, points some value more than pure fit and finish, even if that fit and finish still comes with great components.

Having sad that, I always bulk at any suggestions any one camera has vast superiority over many others. There is no such thing as "this one is so perfect, in use it feels like you were born with it" etc. Ergonomics can be improved, but will never be universally the same. Some will like how Hasselblad flows in their hands, many will not make the adjustment preferring some entirely different brand.

And cost is always part of the equation. While there were times when great looking 501CM kit could be had for under $500, other brands were selling at half that or less at the same time. So long as price paid does not play into purported quality, be happy and use it to best advantage.

In all that I am a true believer that tool can make a craftsman, possibly a creator. If Hasselblad makes one tick better, there is nothing else to it. Just that exactly same may be true with an entirely different camera. And despite all that talk, "scientific" or subjective evidence, end result is not a function of glass used, nor the box it was attached to.
 

Sirius Glass

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Lachlan Young

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No, not at all. It was based on a camera from a crashed German aircraft. www.hasselbladhistorical.eu/Index/HSIndex.aspx

While there may have been a German aerial camera involved at some point very early on - Victor Hasselblad's story supposedly goes - "I received an inquiry – can you make a camera like this? And they showed me the captured German camera. I inspected it closely, and saw that it wasn’t anything very special. So I replied truthfully: ‘No, I cannot make one like that, but I can make one better.’" I'd suggest that it's much more likely that Hasselblad got experience in the manufacturing of modular aerial camera systems for the Swedish military, and then got from there to the 1600F by adding the aerial camera modular system design/ mechanics to the easily held Rolleiflex box shape & then the focal plane shutter and SLR viewing of the Reflex Korelle. As a wildlife photographer, Hasselblad would likely have been familiar with the Reflex Korelle.
 
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removed account4

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they are nice cameras I guess, everyone who has them either loves them or needs another accessory
I think they used to be much better when victor was selling and cameras made by Szilárd Szabad out of his shop in Stockholm.

.<...> it depends which dentist you ask
and you forgot people who can now afford with rich dentists used to p*ss their money away on,
you know, avid photo-hobbiests who could never afford it back in the day when
film backs cost $900 each and had to be serviced yearly ( for $300 a wack ) because now a "system" that used to
cost IDK $10,000 ( with 3 backs and maybe 2 lenses and a body ) now costs like IDK $300 for the whole sh-bang except the pelican case. LOL

nice cameras but a bit to clinical for me, some people like the look, not me.. I'd take a hasselbladski though, you know a breech mount ARAXCMMLU to use with all the ARAX60MLU lenses I have. I don't mind gifts :smile: ..
 
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Sirius Glass

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I don't know where you're getting that story from - but the evidence there is that Hasselblad got experience in the manufacturing of modular aerial camera systems for the Swedish military, and it makes considerably more sense to get from there to the 1600F if you add the aerial camera modular system design/ mechanics to the easily held Rolleiflex box shape & then add a focal plane shutter and SLR viewing of the Reflex Korelle. As a wildlife photographer, Hasselblad would likely have been familiar with the Reflex Korelle. Trying to claim that Hasselblad copied some mysterious camera from a crashed aircraft seems like an attempt at denying his obvious ability to take what he felt were the best features of quite disparate cameras and make something considerably better than the sum of the parts.

A German reconnaissance aircraft crashed in Sweden in World War II. The Swedish military ask Victor Hasselblad to build one like it for their aircraft. Victor said that he could build a better camera and came up with the Ross camera. After World War II Victor Hasselblad brought out a civilian model, called Series One.
You are trying to build the history by picking up pieces and going backwards. That leads to false conclusions.
 

Lachlan Young

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A German reconnaissance aircraft crashed in Sweden in World War II. The Swedish military ask Victor Hasselblad to build one like it for their aircraft. Victor said that he could build a better camera and came up with the Ross camera. After World War II Victor Hasselblad brought out a civilian model, called Series One.
You are trying to build the history by picking up pieces and going backwards. That leads to false conclusions.

Yeah, I found that, but the point stands: it seems to suit various people's agenda to imply that the Hasselblad was based off some sort of super secret Nazi technology, when it's very obvious that the aerial camera in question was pretty standard in its design, and it's clear that the 1600F was attempting to unify the SLR approach of the Reflex Korelle (and the Graflex etc - as people tend to forget that Hasselblad was the Kodak importer/ distributer in Sweden, I think there's a tendency to underestimate Hasselblad's purview of the photographic marketplace), the form factor of the Rolleiflex & the modularity of aerial camera systems - there is only so much that a 5x5" direct vision aerial camera will share with a 120 format SLR. In other words, Hasselblad was using his experience of other camera systems to design a new system that offered him many advantages over what had gone before - it tends to get forgotten that Hasselblad was a keen photographer himself.
 
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Sirius Glass

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Yeah, I found that, but the point stands: it seems to suit various people's agenda to imply that the Hasselblad was based off some sort of super secret Nazi technology, when it's very obvious that the aerial camera in question was pretty standard in its design, and it's clear that the 1600F was attempting to unify the SLR approach of the Reflex Korelle, the form factor of the Rolleiflex & the modularity of aerial camera systems - there is only so much that a 5x5" direct vision aerial camera will share with a 120 format SLR. In other words, Hasselblad was using his experience of other camera systems to design a new system that offered him many advantages over what had gone before - it tends to get forgotten that Hasselblad was a keen photographer himself.

Of course civilization builds by standing on the shoulders of others. He knew that the Leica cloth shutters could get burnt by the sun so he wanted metal shutters. His big mistake was having the works designed by watch makers instead of camera designers, thus his focal plane shutters were not suitable for normal camera use. After several years of less than stunning performance, he switched to leaf shutters in the lens. The leaf shutters naturally worked with flash bulbs and later strobes without the synchronizing problems of the focal plane shutters, so that made the Series V cameras the darling of the fashion photographers [Note: this has nothing to do with dentists.].
 

Alan Gales

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As I said in that other thread, I never heard cameras as such been related to dentists, let alone a Hasselblad as common saying.

Moreover, I always saw Hasselblads as cameras for commercial use, and read most of the respective advertizing in this way. All owners of Hasselblads I know are professional photographers, who kept it for sentimental reason.

Maybe I missed something back then, maybe the west-german situation was different from the US one. It would be interesting to have customer-related sales-figures. The photo sales guys I know are too young to know.

We got former sales guys here from both sides of the ocean, having sold to consumers and professionals, may be they know more about that.

They said the same thing about dentists and Contax's back in the 80's.

I was in a local camera store that I regularly hung out in. A dentist walked in and traded his new Contax RTSll and lens collection in that he had bought the month before. He then bought a new Leica SLR and a bunch of lenses. He had heard that Leica was more prestigious.

One time I bought 2 Contax 167 MT's from a local dentist. They both looked like new except one had battery acid in it from neglect. I cleaned it out with baking soda and water and it worked fine. :D
 

Alan Gales

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As for Hasselblads being overrated, I guess that depends upon who you talk to. Some people say sex is overrated. You got all kinds in this world! :D
 

Sirius Glass

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As for Hasselblads being overrated, I guess that depends upon who you talk to. Some people say sex is overrated. You got all kinds in this world! :D

Yes and the ones that claim that sex is overrated were celebates. Feel free to expand the logic to Hasselblads.
 
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