Thursday, October 01, 2009

Hasselblad focus invention


You gotta say it for the Swedish/Danish camera maker: they do work very, very hard. This is the fourth major generation of their medium format digital system in what, eight years or so. For medium format, that is very fast indeed. And it's not like it's crap they churn out either. :-)

The new H4D camera contains a surprise: invention in autofocus. Who saw that coming from Scandinavia, or in medium format? The autofocus actually takes the motion of the camera into consideration, via a mechanism like the one in the Wii handset. How much of a difference it makes is up to reviewers and history to decide, but it's a very cool idea.

You remember my comment about Europeans tending to be more understated? Well, Danish Hasselblad CEO Christian Poulsen has not heard of it. Here's a quote: "We believe it's the most important innovation in at least 10 years." (Within autofocus? Or in everything on planet Earth?)

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Talking about high-end cameras, Michael Reichman has field-tested the brand-new Leica M9.

1 comment:

neeraj said...

The autofocus actually takes the motion of the camera into consideration ...

I think that's basically the same what our brain does within our vision system, using an internal feedback loop, so that we are able to see the world quite stable and sharp, even with all the body/head/eye movements.