[rollei_list] The Tragedy of the SL66
- From: Marc James Small <marcsmall@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 15:02:25 -0400
At 02:43 PM 4/16/2007, Mark Rabiner wrote:
>
>All and all a far cooler camera than anything to come out of Sweden the
>SL66.
>I'm not dead yet. Maybe I'll get into it.
>Its just that the Hassy stuff in camera stores now are for free or so close
>to it as to not make any difference.
>This SL66 stuff you proably have to pull out some real green for they just
>won't give it to you for two rolls of film as you walk out the door. But
>exquisite enough in every way. Form - function to be worth real money.
>Noticing again the rail on the left side with all the number on it.
>Magnification and exposure factors.
The great Zeiss maven, Charlie Barringer, has
been gnashing his teeth for a decade as he wants
an SL66 and has been surprised to note the same
thing, Mark: Hasselblad gear is no longer,
"Ha$$elblad" gear, but SL66 stuff has managed to hold its price.
The progenitor of the MF SLR was the first Exakta
66 and the Bentzin Primarflex. Hasselblad got
into the program shortly before Franke & Heidecke
began working on it, but not by many years. In
the later 1940's, Hasselblad was a lean company
without many fiscal resources and leaned hard on
both Kodak and Zeiss for lenses. Still, they
never made a deep penetration either in the
professional or advanced amatuer community with
the 1600F/1000F line, and it was only with the
500C that things changed, though, even so, the
500C only became a significant factor in the pro market in the middle 1960's.
At that time, Franke & Heidecke had bounced back
rapidly from the horrors of World War II and was
selling every TLR they could produce by the late
1940's. They were relatively flush with money
(Zeiss loved F&H as they were a cash customer,
unlike other customers of theirs such as Zeiss
Ikon, which often paid its bills years in
arrears). Franke and Heidecke and the middle
management (which then included a number of the
Voigtländer family, by the by) failed to see the
way the market was moving and thus felt no
pressure to push forward with a medium-format SLR
so long as TLR sales held steady.
By 1960, they were starting to flounder: F&H had
pretty well worked out all the bells and whistles
possible with the technology of the time, from
the 2.8F and 3.5F to the Rolleiflex T and the
Rolleicord and the Rolleimagic. They just had
gone as far as the accessible technology
allowed. And then came Ha$$elblad and a number
of pros starting shifting especially wedding and
portrait photographers, a market Viktor
Hasselblad sought. And all that F&H could think
up were the Weitwinkel and Tele Mutars and the
Weitwinkel and Tele Rolleflex cameras, and these
just failed to staunch the flow of red ink which
started in the early 1960's. In the end, F&H DID
push the SL66 into the marketplace but they were
years too late and the marketing was inept. I
will not go as far as Mark does in suggesting
that the SL66 is a better camera than Göttenburg
ever produced, but it certainly is a competitive product.
The Leitz family in Wetzlar and the Franke and
Heidecke families in Braunschweig enjoyed making
a LOT of money for decades from their camera
companies. By the middle 1960's, both families
were pouring their personal fortunes to support
their companies, and these families eventually
sold out after most of their fortunes were
gone. The Hasselblad clan were smarter and sold
out after they had come to own the top-end MF SLR
market but before sales started to slump.
God bless 'em all. Leica and Rolleiflex have
survived, in various permutation, and Hasselblad is now effectively dead.
But, had either Franke or Heidecke been less
pleased with the market in, say, 1950, then the
SL66 would have dominated the upper end of the
market, and the company would possibly still be "Franke & Heidecke".
Marc
msmall@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Cha robh bàs fir gun ghràs fir!
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