Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/09/07

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Subject: [Leica] Hasslelbad vs Mamiya
From: "Gary Klein" <gklein@excel.net>
Date: Tue, 7 Sep 1999 12:54:41 -0500

Around 10 year ago I worked at a portrait commercial studio where we used
both the Hassleblad 500c and 500cm bodies, older chrome blad lenses and the
dreaded RB67.

The RB while not a bad concept was poor in its execution.  The amount of
cheap appearing metals and plastic was insulting.  I liked the lenses, but
man oh man what a dog for reliability.  I am not kidding about this.  We
would send in four RBs for every Hassleblad we would have to send in.  Now
bear in mind the RBs were always on camera stands...always, very seldom used
in the field (ie wedding, commercial work) other than outdoor portraiture.

The stop down mechanism would be a sure thing to puke after three months of
seniors.  But we would have to have it fixed as we used vignetters on nearly
every in studio photograph. I was issued the oldest most decrepid hassleblad
500 c w/ 12 backs you could ever imagine. Old style 70mm back. Old chrome
50mm f4, 80mm f2.8, 150mm f4 lenses.  Really old prism finder.  Old style
focus screens.  We would pound frame after frame with these old blads and
they just kept a clickin.  Prom after prom, wedding after wedding,
commercial job after commercial job.  Those old lenses also held up pretty
nicely.  We had a 80 X 120 inch print in the showroom that was done with a
blad.  It was a hell of a family portrait that really held up well despite
being 6 X 6 cropped.

The RBs would be sent into professional camera in NYC and the Blads would go
to Gil Ghittleman (great service).

The point being these blads were older than the RBs we were using and they
didn't fall apart.  There was some awsome and I mean really awsome
craftsmanship on these hassleblad, every bit as good as a leica....maybe
even more reliable.

gck