I think you should work harder at keeping your excrement issues to yourself, Rob.
An all new way to takes shitty photos!
What? Someone is advertising a crappy product that wonāt better the image quality of a photograph to a group of people who spend enormous amounts of time looking at DxOMark scores instead of going out and taking photos?
Who would have imagined there could be such a market? Oh, hey, PhotoExpo is this week, sweet!
Seriously worth considering then. Iāve considered covering my pretty decent Cannondale bike with ugly stickers to make it a less attractive target for theft.
Iād be inclined to suspect that it would work much, much, better for a bike than a lens.
With the slaughter of low end point and shoots by cellphones, and the retreat of surviving models into various niches on the low end of what used to be DSLR territory, all the really cheap and awful lenses just arenāt discrete units anymore. If you have a discrete lens, the best-case lie about its value will be that it is actually one of the older models that hasnāt aged well, or one of the cruel jokes designed to be bundled with bottom end DSLRs for sale to the unsuspecting. Even if you know nothing about judging the value of a given lens, itās just less plausible every year that any detachable lens you encounter in the field is anything but a sign of some seriousness and enthusiasm on the part of its owner.
Bikes, at least, have a large and steady population of utilitarian junkers to dress up as. Some thieves might be more skilled than others; but it is at least plausible that a bike in active use might barely exceed its value as scrap. Lenses, not so much. If somebody bothered to take it out of storage, itās probably at least modestly interesting.
Back in the dark ages, when I used to go through 10-12 rolls of Plus-X or FP4 every week, some small dings, dents, and brassing were actually things you were OK with having friends see on your camera. Showed it was a tool, and not heavy jewelry.
Hope the hipsters donāt find out, or theyāll be selling decals that give that pristine Leica the appearance of actual useā¦
Hasselblad famously offered a couple of luxury cameras that were rebadged mid-range Sony models with US$5-10K of pointless swoopy curves and (customizable!) hideous textures slapped on. Took the same photos as the cheap model, but thatās luxury for you.
Pedestrian:
Exclusive:
You might be delighted to know Leica sells an actual special edition camera thatās factory-distressed like a pair of jeans to look used out of the box.
Itās even called Correspondent, so you can feel like a grizzled war journalism veteran without all the bothersome actual work, I guess?
Oh, itās ādesignedā by Lenny Kravitz. Yeah, the music guy. Not some actual designer with the same name. I wish I was joking about any of this.
OH. DEAR.GOD.
Talk about things that canāt be un-seenā¦
Arenāt they the ones with an actual reputation(albeit mostly in medium format and higher) to drag through the mud with nonsense like that?
Leica does the same with Panasonic, but only for compact models which are already quite respectable. And the markup is relatively modest, with some genuine customization beyond adding a red dot.
Whatās weird about the ghastly Hasselbadized Sony cameras is that theyāre low-end DSLRs instead of high-end compacts. An RX100 with a tie-in to an old-timey classy camera brand would be extremely desirable. But that thing from Hasselbad ā¦ Jesus.
Thereās nothing wrong with Ye Olde Legendes of Ye Golden Age teaming up with filthy consumer electronics peons(indeed, given who has the good silicon sensors and application processors these days, that might well be for the best); but the sheer tastelessness of the Hasselbladā¦thingā¦ is remarkable.
Sony internals arenāt a bad thing(their optoelectronics group is actually pretty respectable, and does a lot of high quality sensors); but Iād want a company with a legend of precision fabrication and exotic glass to offer Sony guts wrapped in gorgeously overengineered precision machining; not faux leather decals.
The Sony-Zeiss and Panasonic-Leica partnerships are quite sensible pairings if you ask me. Some of the top digital image people + some of the top lens people = lovely results. Not necessarily luxury-priced, either.
Hasselbladās offering isā¦ Something else. Itās even called Lunar, for bonus reputation-smearing cynicism points. āRemember when we went to the moon? Yeah.ā
Given the prices, Hasselblad is arguably in a decent position to offer āthe defense contractor experienceā, if anyone is into that sort of thing.
What is that?
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