[rollei_list] Re: [rollei_list] Re: Cosina Voigtländer - sign of hope for MF?!

I've gotten to know Kobayashi-san pretty well. We've had private meetings at photokina, other photo shows, and in hotel rooms. He is above all a photography enthusiast, and loves to make exactly the toys that he wants to play with. It's wonderful that he can make enough of a profit on this "hobby" to keep going at it. He loves photography -- film photography. His distaste for digital is strong.

However, tooling up for something in medium format would be a very costly venture for his relatively small company. I don't really expect to see him do anything other than 35mm, unless perhaps Zeiss wants to fund the project to put the Contax 645 II into production via Cosina. That could be interesting.

Bob

On Tuesday, September 27, 2005, at 10:51  AM, Jan Decher wrote:

I agree of course. But whenever I get frustrated about the demise of these beautiful medium format cameras (now even the boldly conceived Contax 645), I look at what Mr. Kobayashi at Cosina is doing with his revival of "Voigtländer" rangefinders and all those classy looking lenses (even Nikon and Contax RF mount lenses, SLR lenses in stunning "Contarex finish" and the odd revival of the chrome Topcon 1.4/58 on an all-mechanical chrome M42 "Bessaflex").
To me looking at the Cosina Website (http://www.cameraquest.com./index.htm) is like leafing through my 1955 catalog from Foto Schaja, Munich.

And Cosina got enough attention to have now been commissioned to built an M-mount rangefinder for Carl Zeiss, which will bring back fully mechanical Zeiss lenses like the Biogon, Sonnar etc. at half the price of Leica lenses. A nice endorsement I think.

In some ways we should all be supporting such a visionary program. Who knows what Kobayashi is up to next: revival of the elegant vertical postwar Exakta 66 with CZ Tessar perhaps - this time with reliable Japanese mechanics... ;-) 

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