>>>
http://www.worldofphoto.com/pdf-archiv/aktuell/26_27_FrankeundHeide%234D37FC.pdf
>>> All the best Carlos
Thanks Carlos for finding this preprint.
I'll not comment directly about the special edition Rollei 35, I
prefer to read what Mr. Hartje says about the HY6 partnership &
project. Sure this is a kind of official press release, but with 90
people at F&H and a strong partnership to develop the HY6 camera, I'm
quite confident in the future of F&H.
To me the good news are that F&H have a strong R&D department. When we
visited F&H in March 2006 with Dirk-Roger, of course everything at the
R&D dept was strictly off-limits for us !! So we did not suspect what
was going on with the HY6 project !
BTW since we are celebrating the 50-th anniversary of the European
Union (treaty of Rome, 1957) with fireworks in Berlin, and since we
love here to remind the story of Rollei and old European photo
manufacturers, who would have predicted that Jenoptik, reborn from the
ashes of Carl-Zeiss-Jena-DDR, would be some day the project leader for
an innovative digital medium format camera partly fabricated at
Salzdahlumer Straße, Braunschweig !
So we can be optimistic ! I hope that F&H will find a good balance
between professional electronic cameras like the HY6 and some limited
edition classic cameras for other customers. But professionals making
a good living during the week with a HY6 system could turn into a
different customer for a 4,0 FW or another classical "niche" product,
for their personnal projects during the week-end for example ;-)
And after all, Swiss watch manufactures _do_ innovate in the field of
classical mechanical watches, but since the great crisis of the 1970's
they have eventually found customers that support them by the purchase
of really innovative mechanical watches ... too bad for us that many
sell for $1,000,000 retail price each ! In parallel, current
machine-tools that fabricate affordable maechanical watches today have
nothing in common with what was used in the sixties. The retail price
of a simple, entry-level, mechanical self-winding swiss watch movement
is about 50-60 euros purchased as a single item by a "pedestrian"
customer like you and me.
See for example http://www.mdwatch.ch/page_fournitures.html
CNC machine tools that fabricate F&H products today have nothing in
common with old machines. So if there is a market for million products
like for entry-level mechanical watch movements, classical
mechanical devices can be cheap... the Japanese photographic industry
has proved it a long time ago !
So clearly if F&H goes well and gets good cash by selling good
products, I do not see any reason why they would not innovate in
classical mechanical cameras. They already have innovated by modifying
the focusing mechanism of the 4,0 FT ! But I doubt that we'll see the
come-back of a rangefinder-coupled Rollei 35, made in Germany, at a
retail price of 1000 euros...
--
Emmanuel BIGLER
<bigler@xxxxxxxx>
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