A new tremor on Thursday traversed a photography world already shaken up by the arrival of digital technology as Phase One, a Copenhagen-based company that caters to professional photographers, announced a plan to acquire some high-end photography assets from Eastman Kodak.
To nobody's surprise, Kodak wound down its 35mm Kodachrome film product on Monday. In the rarefied realm of medium-format photography, where film sizes are much larger, and the demand for quality is much higher, the change to the digital era has been equally jarring.
Phase One, though, was digital from the outset, and it's become a force for consolidation in the digital medium-format photography market. The company announced its plan to acquire technology and hire employees from Kodak's Leaf medium-format brand just months after taking control of Japanese medium-format camera maker Mamiya.
Leaf sells medium-format cameras, digital-sensor camera backs, and Leaf Capture photography software. The latter two products, but not necessarily the first, will live on under Phase One management.
(Credit: Leaf)The vast majority of cameras sold today are either all-in-one compact models or higher-end single-lens reflex (SLR) cameras with interchangeable lenses and larger, better image sensor chips. Medium-format cameras are another step up the ladder, costing tens of thousands of dollars for digital models, employing even larger sensors with more megapixels, catering to professionals almost exclusively, and offering not just interchangeable lenses but also sometimes interchangeable viewfinders and "backs," too, where image sensors or film packs are mounted.
Once the Leaf deal closes in about two weeks, Phase One Chief Executive Henrik O. Hakonsson said in an interview, Phase One will continue to develop and sell Leaf's digital backs and photography software through a new Israel-based company, Leaf Imaging. The new company will sell products that use Phase One's image sensor chip technology but that maintain Leaf's user interface approach, he said.
"We do not believe you can box everything together and serve all the pro photographers' needs," Hakonsson said. "One main thing we can get from Leaf is the ability to serve this market through a broader range of solutions than our own current design and engineering is able to offer. Another is, we need to be able to have more critical mass" in designing and manufacturing high-end image sensors.
Terms of the deal weren't disclosed.
The changes illustrate just how complicated the digital transformation is for the high-end photography market, populated by the likes of high-priced photographers who shoot Vogue fashion ads and close-ups of jewelry and watches.
Back in the film era, it wasn't much more expensive to produce larger frames of film for these more demanding photographers than the 35mm film size used by mainstream folks. But in the digital era, with the constraints of processor manufacturing, it's vastly more expensive to produce larger image sensors than small ones. Phase One's top-end camera, the 60-megapixel P65+, costs about $40,000.
That economic reality is behind much of the medium-format market turmoil. Phase One, though, has grown each of the last seven years. "I don't think there's a simple recipe. I think it's equal parts hard work, good thinking, and a little bit of luck," Hakonsson said.
Phase One faces plenty of challenges, though--notably Canon's 21-megapixel, $7,000 1Ds Mark III and Nikon's newer $8,000 D3X. These models benefit from those companies' deep engineering, manufacturing, and marketing experience and from their broad customer bases. Both those companies are aiming their cameras at studio photographers with medium-format expertise.
Will Leaf's camera survive?
Leaf offers both Aptus-branded digital backs and AFi-branded digital cameras. While Phase One has rights to sell both those lines, it has committed so far only to sell the digital backs, Hakonsson said.
That means that Phase One's move will likely reassure Leaf digital-back customers, but those using the AFi camera still face an uncertain future. The Leaf AFi was developed in partnership with two other medium-format brands, Franke and Heidecke's Rollei and Jenoptik's Sinar, which sell their own versions of the camera, but Phase One declined to join that partnership earlier.
That camera partnership's future already is under a dark cloud. Franke and Heidecke, which manufactures the camera system for the trio, filed for bankruptcy protection earlier this year.
Phase One will conduct a "thorough investigation of the product concept," Hakonsson said, "but there is no guarantee that Leaf or Phase One will support the system. We do have product rights to it and are able to do it, but it has to come down to a business decision whether it makes sense to revive the system."
The allies behind the system have made some progress since its inception, but Phase One remains concerned about issues with optics, durability, and service, Hakonsson said.
Digital-back business
Digital backs, on the other hand, are a better business for the company. They can be used with a range of medium-format cameras and with other more exotic models, such as large-format cameras and view cameras--the kind with the collapsing bellows most people associate with 19th-century photography but that still are in use.
In this segment of the market, where photographers are more set in their ways, older camera designs can last a long time. Just selling backs means the image sensor component of the camera can be changed relatively often to keep up with technology, but the rest of the system, which changes more slowly, can be used for longer.
"Six years ago, Contax discontinued production, but we've never sold as many Contax digital backs as we do today," Hakonsson said.
The other major power in the medium-format realm is Hasselblad, whose recent designs such as the H3D-II have favored integrated camera designs rather than interchangeable backs. That integration move deprived Phase One of a lot of potential digital back business and provided motivation for the Mamiya and Leaf deals.
Phase One has about 100 employees of its own and another 150 through Mamiya. The Leaf group is in the process of hiring about 25 employees who lost their Kodak jobs, he said.
Phase One has primarily used Kodak's image sensors, but its more recent models, including the high-scoring P65+, are built by Canadian manufacturer Dalsa. "For maybe the last 18 months, Dalsa has been ahead," he said.
Updated 5:01 p.m. PDT with further details on Phase One competition.
Phase One, a Copenhagen-based maker of professional-grade digital camera technology, has invested in and assumed some control over Japanese camera maker Mamiya.
(Credit:
Phase One)
Phase One and Mamiya already had a partnership for one medium-format camera through a partnership begun in 2006, but now the alliance is much tighter, with Phase One in the driver's seat for some key areas, Phase One said Wednesday.
"Phase One is making a significant financial investment in Mamiya Digital Imaging, thus becoming a major shareholder in the company behind the Mamiya brand of medium-format cameras and lenses," Phase One said in a statement. "To ensure clarity of brand positioning and minimize product overlap, in close cooperation with Mamiya top management, Phase One will take on strategic leadership for the companies' research and development, marketing, and distribution management."
Medium-format cameras feature a sensor that's much larger and therefore more expensive to manufacture than those even in high-end $8,000 SLRs from Canon and Nikon, but that offer more megapixels for large, high-quality printing demands.
Toshio Midorikawa, president of Mamiya Digital Imaging, argued that the companies bring complementary abilities: "Together, Phase One and Mamiya Digital Imaging own all competencies required for developing superior, innovative medium-format camera systems. Our combined expertise comprises digitalization, camera fine mechanics, optics design and production, and broad ranges of software and firmware capabilities," he said. "And as a result of our close collaboration, new products are just around the corner. We plan to introduce both new leaf shutter lenses and even more super lightweight focal plane shutter lenses in 2009. We aim to offer the world's widest range of medium format lenses for Mamiya and Phase One camera platforms."
Medium-format cameras are used chiefly by professional studio photographers; Phase One's P65+ image sensor back offers 60 megapixel resolution on a sensor measuring 53.9mm by 40.4mm, much larger than the 36x24mm sensors in high-end conventional SLRs from Canon, Nikon, and Sony. Phase One and Mamiya competitors include Hasselblad, Sinar and Leaf.
Phase One's upcoming 60-megapixel professional camera.
(Credit: Phase One)Phase One is fleshing out its transformation from a maker of high-end image sensors for others' cameras into a maker of full-on cameras.
At the Photokina camera show in Germany, the company announced "successful alliances" with Leica Camera, Mamiya, and Hartblei to bring third-party lenses to its Phase One 645 camera system, and it said it will begin selling several lenses of its own by the end of the year. Those lens models are a 28mm f4.5, a 45mm f2.8, an 80mm f2.8, a 120mm f4.0, a 150mm f2.8, and a 75-150mm f4.5 zoom.
The professional camera, with a 60-megapixel sensor and a starting price of $41,990, is also due to ship by the end of the year. Coming in the first quarter of 2009 will be an 80mm leafshutter lens and a vertical grip.
The company also announced at the camera show an upgrade to the professional version of its its raw-image editing software.
Also new from the company is a 15-megapixel sensor mode for the 60-megapixel sensor. This mode combines four pixels into one that measures 12 microns square, extending the sensitivity range to ISO 1600.
Phase One's Capture One 4 software devotes as much screen real estate as possible to photos.
(Credit: Phase One)Phase One, a maker of high-end digital-camera components, has released the first major update to its raw-image conversion software in years.
Capture One 4 includes a new user interface with maximum screen real estate devoted to the picture itself, better abilities to edit images' shadows and highlights, support for reading and writing Adobe Systems' Digital Negative (DNG) format, and the dark background that's currently popular as a way to get photos to stand out better.
The software costs $129, but upgrades are free. It runs on Windows XP SP2 and Vista and on Mac OS X 10.4.11 and 10.5. Capture One 4 is available now via download at http://www.phaseone.com/4
Although Phase One's chief business is selling its own camera "backs," the image sensors and related electronics that mount onto high-end medium-format camera bodies, the Danish company also sells the Capture One software with support for raw-image files from many manufacturers' cameras.
All digital SLR (single-lens reflex) cameras and some higher-end compact models can produce raw images, the sensor data before it's been processed by the camera into a JPEG. Raw images can provide higher quality, but they also require time and effort to edit manually into more convenient formats. Capture One competes with software such as Apple Aperture, Bibble, and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom for the raw-processing task.
Phase One signed a technology partnership with Microsoft in October that will give the company the ability to deal with programming challenges such as handling gargantuan image files. Also as part of the deal, Phase One will support Microsoft's HD Photo format, which Microsoft is standardizing at the Joint Photographic Experts Group under the name JPEG XR.
(Via Rob Galbraith)
A bug-report form shows an option for 'Canon 5D Mark II'
(Credit: Phase One)A Web site for reporting bugs in Phase One's raw image conversion software gives a new hint that Canon is preparing a sequel to its EOS 5D, its lower-cost SLR with a relatively large image sensor the size of a full frame of 35mm film.
"Canon 5D Mark II" appears on a list of cameras on Phase One's Capture One bug-report form that otherwise seems populated with shipping models.
Be careful assuming that means the 5D sequel is imminent or has its final name. My coworker Phil Ryan uncovered a reference to a UPC bar code for a Canon 7D in October. And Phase One's list isn't perfect; it doesn't include Olympus' new E-3, for example.
Canon's 5D, announced in August 2005, is popular among serious amateurs, landscape photographers, and as a backup camera for pros. Its starting price of about $3,300 has now dropped to about $2,200, and many expect a sequel soon--perhaps in conjunction with the Photo Marketing Association's trade show in January.
Canon's EOS 5D
(Credit: Canon)Now that Nikon has entered the full-frame SLR market, the $5,000 professional-oriented D3 due to ship later this month, the 5D has assumed greater strategic importance for Canon. Nikon has a more competitive lineup these days, but at least for now Nikon still doesn't have a lower-cost full-frame model.
(Via Ubergizmo)
PhaseOne Chief Executive Henrik Hakonsson is bridging a vast digital photography divide.
A medium-format camera with a Phase One digital back.
His company makes top-end image sensor housings called digital backs, each costing tens of thousands of dollars and attaching to high-end medium-format cameras with similarly high price tags. But he just signed a partnership with Microsoft, which gears its products for the broadest possible audience.
The Phase One product that brings these two worlds together is Capture One, software that helped pioneer the area of processing "raw" images taken directly from image sensors without any in-camera processing. The software exists chiefly for Phase One's high-end customers, but it also supports many mainstream cameras.
Through the partnership, terms of which were not disclosed, Microsoft will help Phase One tackle technical challenges of improving that software, Hakonsson said. And according to Josh Weisberg, Microsoft's director of digital imaging evangelism, Capture One will be able to handle files encoded with Microsoft's HD Photo format, which the company is advocating as a higher-quality replacement for the ubiquitous JPEG and is standardizing as JPEG XR.
Phase One, based in Copenhagen, was founded in 1993 and is owned by its 130 employees. On the hardware side, its top-end P45+ back uses a 39-megapixel sensor from Kodak. It sells two versions of Capture One, the $499 Pro and the $99 LE, but with the upcoming version 4, the LE version will simply be named Capture One 4.
I chatted with Hakonsson about his company's software, hardware, and Microsoft alliance earlier this month. Here's an edited transcript.
Phase One CEO Henrik Hakonsson
(Credit: Phase One)
Q: Most people haven't heard of Phase One. Can you give us a thumbnail sketch?
Hakonsson: Phase One is the world's leading digital camera back manufacturer. If you take a copy of Vogue magazine and look at the first 50 pages, approximately 80 percent of the images are shot with Phase One digital back and Capture One software. Our position in the market is the very top maybe 1 percent of the photo segment--shooters who work with the biggest clients and the most demanding photographic applications.
What's your sales volume for digital backs?
The global market will exceed 10,000. Phase 1 has more than 50 percent of the market. Some of our digital back competitors are working to make less costly solutions. We try to target the most demanding photographers.
What will result from the Microsoft partnership?
For Phase One, the main reason for doing this was the ability to get access to some tools which will help us provide better services for the kind of photographers we're working with. We're getting into file sizes that may be two to three times what we have today, and the speed of being able to handle these files requires other tools than what we have in our portfolio.
For me, performance is No. 1. The parameters on which we position our product are speed, image quality, and ease of use. On the performance side, we needed a partner.
How big are your image files?
Typically 150MB. We expect larger file sizes for the next two to three years. The ability to make sure that people can browse and process images is important going forward. Microsoft has a range of tools for assuring that we can serve our high-end customers, who are the ones we are predominantly concerned about.
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