Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1998/08/19

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Subject: [Leica] Hasselblad XPan-1 and new Leicas
From: Simon Ogilvie <simon_ogilvie@ionica.co.uk>
Date: Wed, 19 Aug 1998 17:08:19 +0100

I got a call the other day from a market research company
asking if I'd be interested to look at a new camera and give
my comments on it!  We made an appointment for today,
and it turns out the new camera was the Hasselblad XPan
(although it was labelled EX-1 which I believe is the Fuji name).

My first impressions of it were that it was slightly bigger and
heavier than I'd expected, but it's beautifully made and handles
very nicely.  It's bigger than an M6, but not by much.  The extra
width is necessary to accommodate the panoramic format, but the
camera is also deeper and heavier than an M6.  They only had
the 45mm lens with it, but one of the questions indicated that
other lenses were in the pipeline, and the Zeiss name might be
on some of them...  It's very smooth in operation, and the shutter
is quiet although not as quiet as our beloved Leica :-)

On the subject of Leica, there's a small article in the current
issue of the UK magazine Professional Photographer which
states that the new M6 with TTL metering taken from the R8,
plus a few other tweaks, is a fact and is due at Photokina.
Also confirmed is the 90 Apo Summicron and the 135/3.4
which replaces both "current" 135mm M lenses.  Another
rumour they mentioned was the new Contax medium format
rangefinder, which is still rumour, but when the author of the
article contacted Contax to ask about it, their initial reaction
was "how did you know about that!"...

There's going to be some interesting things coming up at
Photokina this year - I wish I could go!

Simon.