MAMIYA 28mm annaunced

It may mean that Mamiya is not dead ... or not.

It would be interesting to see if it comes after of before the Fuji's H3 38mm (I mean Hasselblad)


AF 28mm f/4.5 - Super Wide AngIe Aspherical Lens

The world’s first medium format, super wide-angle lens, AF 28mm is ideal for a wide range of use, including commercial, architecture and outdoor photography

http://www.mamiya.com/assets/pdfs/Mamiya_New_AF_Lenses_PR.pdf

http://www.mamiya.com/newsevents.asp?id=5&id2=130

Now I wonder if it will only work on the ZD II due to processing paramaters?

It is interesting to compare the two surviving MF camera companies and the possible strategy incorporating the digital componet...

Hasselblad has the lion share of the market for cameras and wants to increase the sale of their digital backs
Mamiya also wants to sell more ZD's and coming out with a 28mm that "only works on the ZD" could be a way to sell more ZDs, but since the ZD is not even distributed in the USA the move would be even more radical than that of the H3, so I think that this lens is good for all 645AF's and could even be used with film -- something that the Hasselblads 28mm is not going to do since it is "full frame".

I wonder if Mamiya's 28 has been formulated for digital or not. There seams to be the notion that retrofocus wide angle lenses are better for digital than non-retrofocus optics, so in this case such a lens could even be a killer application for architecture and interior photographers.

I talked to one such fellow photographer the other day and he said that he is shooting film because of two problems: a) the long exposures he is used to and the optics: "I have a collection of fine Schneider optics" he said.

I made a 15" exposure recently with my P 25 and the resulting image was really clean, this may be because of new firmware, I would have to do some more tests about this, but I don't see it as a big problem.

The other one will get better with time, when the camera and lens manufacturers realize that the large format market may be migrating to 645 format and that there is a void of solutions that would provide tilt shift at wide angles.

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