Hasselblad CEO Christian Poulsen looks into the future
I attended Hasselbladâs press conference this morning at PhotoPlus, where CEO Christian Poulsen laid out his vision for the companyâs futureâand the future of digital photography in generalâfor a small group of photographers and journalists. Some of it was surprising; some if it wasnât; all of it was interesting. He started by laying out where the company has gone in the past year, since the merger with IMACON: The introduction of the first digital backs, cameras, and scanners. He showed some staggering sales graphs where film sales and digital sales made an almost perfect âXâ?, with a 1-year 30% drop in V-System sales and the H-series digital and hybrid sales replacing V-series medium format sales almost entirely. He also talked candidly about some mistakes he thought theyâd made with marketing the new products: not selling the H1 as hard as they could because they were trying to protect the V503 and V905, and not making a bigger deal of how good their lenses are. Then he moved on to his vision for the future.
Itâs corporate policy not to discuss specifics until theyâre production-ready, so there were no mentions of future
products, or even a general timeline, just the overall trajectory for the company. The big news is that they intend to
go all digital at some point in the not-too-distant future. Of course, that isnât really news; theyâve been saying it
since the merger. But itâs a little bit different to read it in an anonymous press release, and then to hear the head
or the worldâs most storied camera company say the V-system has a limited future and all of their effort from here on
out is going into the H-system. It gives you a little twinge. They will, however, continue to make film products
as long thereâs a market, and he made it sound like th V503âs death is likely to be long and slow.
So what does the future look like? First, interchangeable digital backs. Since, unlike film cartridges, digital backs
are very expensive, pros want backs that can be used on more than one camea. You might products from both Hasselblad
and Mamiya, but youâre probably not going to buy a Hasselblad body, a Mamiya body, a Hasselblad or Phase One back, and
a Leaf back. Itâs far too expensive. And while sales of backs have been fairly flat, the market seems to be picking up.
Future development, then, will focus on both backs and integrated digital cameras. Second, scanners: sales of
high-end scanners like the Flextight continue to be strong, if fairly flat.
And finally, cameras. The main goals are; ergonomics, compactness, (relative) affordability, improved wireless, bit
depth and other quality improvements, and increased megapixels. Yes, you read that correctly: Hasselblad wants more
megapixels, about 45. Poulsen isnât out to resurrect the megapixel myth by any means; Heâs satisfied with current image
resolutions, and probably would interpolate out the added pixels to keep file sizes downânobody wants a RAW images to
move into the gigabyte rangeâbut in his opinon higher pixel count is the only real solution to moire, and getting rid
of moire completely will take about 45MP. The challenge wonât be just adding pixels, either, but keeping and adding
color depth: if you squeeze to many pixels into a small space, the color quality degrades. In his opinion, this has
already started to happen to some DSLRs.
He also reaffirmed Hasselbladâs commitment to Adobeâs DNG as a RAW format. Although theyâre certainly capable of
implementing a proprietary format like everyone else, he thinks standardization is important for the industry because
competeing formats make life difficult for the consumer and they have a limited shelf life; as formats change people
will lose access to their older pictures. It also makes it difficult to develop comprehensive workflow tools when every
piece od software invloved has to support a constantly changing number of formats. I couldnât agree more. His final
though was on sensor size: he doesnât think weâll ever see a âfull frameâ? 645 camera, at least not from Hasselblad,
because the expense of manufacturing a sensor that large will probably never be justified by the minimal improvement in
quality.
The other design goal he mentioned that I found interesting. Was a âprofessional look.â? It is a goal of Hasselblad
design to look different from DSLR and EVF cameras, even as the (what to call them D645?) bodies become increasingly
smaller. Why? Because people expect it, especially the people who are paying for them. He tells the story of taking one
of his H2D prototypes to wedding, and the bride kept smiling at his camera instead of the hired photographersâ Nikon.
Slightly apocryphal, no doubt, but still a valid point: both the person behind the camera and the person in front of it
really do expect a high end camera to look the part, and itâs interesting to think of âlooks expensiveâ? as a design
feature.
After that, it was on to a discussion of the
H2, but more on that later.
