Hasselblad CEO Christian Poulsen looks into the future
Filed in archive Cameras , Opinion , Photography by Andrew Garrett on October 22, 2005
Hasselblad CEO Christian Poulsen looks into the future

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 you're probably not going to buy a Hasselblad body, a Mamiya body, a Hasselblad or Phase One back, and a Leaf back. It's 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.
And
Hasselblad wants more megapixels, about 45. Poulsen isn't out to resurrect the megapixel myth by any means; He's satisfied with current image resolutions, and probably would interpolate out the added pixels to keep file sizes down-nobody wants a RAW images to move into the gigabyte range-but 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 won't be just adding pixels, either, but keeping and adding color depth[...]
But, most importantly (to me):
He also reaffirmed Hasselblad's commitment to Adobe's DNG as a RAW format. Although they're 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 of software invloved has to support a constantly changing number of formats.
Bolding mine. Man, it's good to see when the higher ups at some companies really know what they're talking about, and are making decisions that benefit the customer, long term.
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