Hasselblad: a hybrid future?

A visit to Gothenburg, Sweden, and the headquarters of Victor Hasselblad AB, December 12 & 13 1994

(This is a text document of 3,300 words)

My colleagues on the trip were Keith Wilson (Amateur Photographer and Photo Technique), Willy Cheung (Practical Photography), Steve Hynes (Professional Photographer and Electronic Imaging) and Reuel Golden (British Journal of Photography) - between us, representing three leading amateur magazines and three professional titles.

When we arrived, only Hasselblad UK's director Simon Barnard and advertising agency director Tony Burd knew I was representing PHOTON as well as PHOTOpro. They did know, however, that Steve Hynes and I shared a strong interest in new technologies, and that our amateur press colleagures were just waking up to digital photography. Neither of them had yet used Adobe Photoshop. Personally I look forward to seeing what Willy does when he gets hold of digital equipment - he was a top competing, published amateur before he was drawn into the photo press, and he's still probably the only one of us who could make a really fine exhibition print. But then, Willy has an FRPS to prove it!

This, by the way, is one of the great things about publishing on the Web. If I even mentioned one of my 'rival' editors by name in my paper publications, it would be unusual. Here, I can spare the space to say that these guys are great company even after a surfeit of soused herring. Anyway, to business.

The Erna and Victor Hasselblad Foundation

These include awards honouring individual photographers; in 1994, the recipient of their International Photography Prize was Susan Meiselas (New York, Magnum). The medal is accompanied by a cash sum of 225,000 SEK, around $30,000.

We met Brigitta Forsell, assistant at the Center, and studied the current exhibit The Exposed with mixed feelings. The subject-matter ranged from (staged?) rape victims in the open air, through masturbation, to giant close-ups of the faces of the involuntary perfecti of AIDS. The sheer size of many prints made it impossible to avoid their impact.

This was a strange way to enter the spirit of a Swedish Yuletide; off the 'plane, a quick coach tour of the city's most visible libraries, museums and hospitals (Gothenburgers posses great civic pride and inexhaustible local knowledge), then huge enlargements of the victims of destiny. Or were they just the victims of art? Were they even real?

Arriving at the waterfront block which is the Hasselblad HQ and factory, comprised of three 19th-century buildings grafted together but well conserved, we stopped first to tour the new Gothenburg Opera House, acoustically modelled on Dresden but architecturally echoing naval construction and heavy engineering skills now waning in the city's shipyards.

We took a few photographs in the expansive foyer. I used the Contax G1 with its 28mm lens, and rested it on a counter for a brief time exposure. A solitary cyclist kept going back and forth outside the window. It would have been better in black and white.

Some Swedish glogg cheered everyone up, and prepared us to meet Staffan Junel, Hasselblad's new President and CEO, who flew in from a meeting in Germany.

Bucking the trends

We learned that despite falling world sales of rollfilm cameras as a whole, Hasselblad sales had increased. The main areas of increased sales were in Asia and Pacific Rim countries, primarily South-East Asia and China. This was backed up with company reports and figures.

We were also drawn to believe that a Hasselblad electronic camera designed and made by Hasselblad, rather than an add-on scan back, is on the drawing-board. It is an intention, but does not yet appear to be a prototype. A process of question and answer drew the following broad conclusions:

• Hasselblad's research shows that photographers want film negatives or slides as well as an electronic image
• These must be exactly real-time coincident with an electronic image, not a slow scan, or a picture taken a few milliseconds afterwards
• The final answer will probably be a camera which can take both conventional and electronic pictures simultaneously

In the evening we returned to a different waterfront for a traditional Swedish Christmas dinner, which turned out to be serial courses of fish, fish, fish, reindeer, meatballs and cheesecake. Despite Santa Claus's accordion-playing welcome it was great fun, and very heartening to find that the CEO of the world's best camera manufacturer can find time to guide a bunch of journos round the finer points of fifty different ways of serving herring!

Home on the range

We were rather hoping the perfect blonde angels who had arrived for a beer in the hotel bar the night before after doing the rounds singing in city restaurants would be there. As it was, the workforce resources of Hasselblad provided a pretty good alternative; a three-Santa combo on bass guitar, synth and squeeze-box introducing a well-rehearsed processional choir from the staff. Dawn spread over Gothenburg harbour as they sang their carols, and it seemed a pretty good way to start December 13th.

Hasselblad's President Staffan Junel gave a short speech in Swedish to the breakfasting workforce, with the Santia Lucia choir behind him. One of the ladies had fainted towards the end of their carols, but tried to resume - only to faint again.

We then looked in detail at three Hasselblad models - the basic 501C, the 201F and the 203FE. The new Flexi-Body, a simple set of bellows with movements and lens/film mag mounts at either end, attracted our attention much more.

At one point, every editor was simultaneously photographing this unit, much to the frustration of Gustav Lagergren, Hasselblad's PR and Advertising Manager, who was trying to introduce his technical staff to show us the mainstream cameras.

The Flexi-Body isn't even available yet; it was a prototype. A price has been fixed at around �800-1,000 ($1,200 to $1,500) and we all agreed that every Hasselblad user with a studio would want one.

Hasselblad wanted to know which of the three reflex cameras we would buy. I said I would probably just buy the 501C; I prefer a very lightweight, simple, mechanical camera. Willy Cheung and Keith Wilson, despite representing the amateur press, both preferred the most expensive, the 203FE with its electronic focal plane shutter, auto bracketing and new E-type magazines which can have the film speed set on them for auto metering.

The FE series lenses, I thought, would be too expensive. I would prefer the normal CF type lenses which are a stop slower. I was quickly corrected; the FE series lenses are exactly the same price as the earlier F range, and only 10% more than CF lenses on average. I had to ask twice about this: was that correct? Could you really get a 150mm f2.8 with electronic metering contacts for the just 10% more than the price of a 150mm f4 leaf-shutter lens, purely mechanical?

Yes, you can, they said. I said that if that was the case, the difference was not significant in terms of choice. Ten per cent was not enough to influence a photographer; they would pick the system they preferred. The exceptional brightness of the 150mm f2.8 did impress me, and its performance with the new 1.4X FE tele converter, making a highly usable 225mm f4, looked fine on a quick visual check. It would certainly have done fine for portraits, and the projected slides of architectural detail indicated that it was good enough for critical quality commercial and technical work.

I last owned a complete Hasselblad system (brand new!) back in 1986 before the taxman obliged me to sell it. I have to admit that handling the cameras again reminded me why I was had been willing to overspend on such an extravagance to start with, and how much I had regretted parting with it after less than a year's use.

Electronic links

Pixolo is aimed at news photographers using modem links to send images from hotel-room processed films back to base for short deadline publication. Basically, it consists of an enhanced set of drivers for popular scanners such as the Kodak RFS 2035 Plus, Nikon Coolscan, and Polaroid SprintScan, with a stand-alone capture application. File compression and newspaper standard captioning (IPTC format) are all built-in to a very simple, clear, rapid interface. It can support most popular file standards.

Why doesn't it run on Macs? Well, that was clear - it multitasks, putting Twain or direct driver scanning into the background while captioning one picture and simultaneously transmitting a third finished job by modem, ISDN or any other standard link. The system uses standard, openly accessible FTP and could work through Internet in future. At present, Jan admitted, links will tend to be 'dedicated' only because no customer will want it otherwise.

Any photographer could buy this �2,000 ($3,000) software package and a similarly priced combo of PC, scanner and modem. At the other end of the line, the newspaper uses Hasselblad ImageBasket software to receive pictures from up to six incoming lines per terminal. If the photographer has a password and is known to the picture desk, files could be sent at any time and show up as an on-screen catalogue and a tray full of quick thermal print-outs with captions.

ImageBasket links through to two other modules - ImageDepot archiving, and ImageTuner, a similarly PC-based correction, enhancement, cropping and CMYK conversion package. This has provision for creating custom press profiles and separation set-ups without calling for expensive outside consultancy. It will store up to ten preset CMYK conversions and Hasselblad will train the operator to perform densitometer-based calibration from press proofs.

Once again, ImageTuner is extremely simple to use with large, clear controls and a huge preview window. Where Photoshop filters show you a couple of postage stamp areas, Tuner divides the entire screen into two halves and shows you two 7 x 5" prints - before and after sharpening. Instead of arcane numbers, you get a set of degrees of sharpening, simple white and black point tuning, slider controlled color balance, and so on. It is real-time for many functions, and records some of these as annotations, so a file given sharpen level 3 displays a small 'sf3' note in its info box.

However, Tuner has no undo or revert - you must keep a backup or second copy of the original file. This contrasts with current developments in mainstream image processing software which tend toward multiple undos, seamless tool-controlled local revert and so on. In return for such limitations ImageTuner can background process separation files, typically taking 3-4 minutes to perform a CMYK conversion and send the result to the layout station or OPI server (etc).

London's Daily Mail has just installed a Crosfield Celsis 360 Scanner and this newspaper's pre-press color manager has made statements such as "the Celsis 360 scans transparencies which are 90 per cent correct, as opposed to other scanners in use where the figure can be as low as 40 per cent� the result is that the time spent in Photoshop is limited to the absolute essentials" in the press publicity issued by Crosfield. In a world which is prepared to issue such meaningful 'figures', the big Lego interface and controls of ImageTuner will fit straight in.

It's even worth quoting a further bit from the Celsis PR release, to help position the newspaper market's level of sophistication: "For example, we can typically save around half-an-hour when we enlarge a 35mm transparency by 1500 per cent. In our line of business, with the tight deadlines we work to, that gives us considerable breathing space". This quote will be greeted with surprise by those used to spending roughly 15 minutes in total preparing a scan of that size. How can you save half an hour on a 15-minute job?

So, Hasselblad's two-minute file enhancement, instant file transfer (almost), background scanning (vital with a Coolscan!) and 4-minute CMYK conversion to a custom profile - well, this is the stuff picture desk dreams are made of. You could even train a junior assistant to operate this system, which is more than can be said for a Leafscan and Photoshop. Running on plain vanilla 486 16Mb machines adds considerable appeal to large newspaper group accountants.

All things under the Sun

ImageDepot looks ideally suited to publications with requirements of 25,000 'active' images and archives of ten times that number, with more powerful machines and larger storage enabling far bigger collections to be managed. It is compatible with large hard disks, tape archives, off-line tapes, on-line CD ROM jukeboxes, off-line CD ROM, magneto-optical and similar solutions to the problems of storing large files.

Integrated with the other modules, ImageDepot could in theory be accessed by any X-Windows terminal or emulator over the Net. However, most systems are expected to be internal, on ethernet or faster fibre optics; some may use dedicated lines to link different publishing centers within a single newspaper group. Jan-Owe made it plain that the entire system has been designed to be open, and to be fully compatible with standard networks, standard comms devices, standard protocols and interfaces - TCP/IP, FTP, SQL, X-Windows, Ethernet... and Internet.

Even so, Hasselblad Electronic Imaging AB does not possess an Internet facility, does not use the Web and has not explored the existing image storage and transmission developing on Internet. Nor does Jan-Owe Palm think that national newspapers and freelance photographers will use Internet; he considers that investments of �25,000 ($40,000) for a small local picture desk, as much again for a small archive, and �2,000 per freelance or staff member transmission software will be no deterrent.

Software piracy has been a problem with previous Hasselblad picture handling releases. The Spanish version of their earlier software has apparently been copied and sold with systems, resulting in difficult out-of-court negotations in a country with notoriously long-winded and expensive legal procedures as well as vague copyright law. The final releases of Pixolo, ImageBasket, ImageTuner and ImageDepot will be dongle-protected.

This software will have a major impact in continental Europe and Scandinavia, where Hasselblad dominates newspaper image management. In the United States, Associated Press enjoys a near monopoly through the bond between its 'solution' and its service, which is essential to any newspaper. In Britain, the market is complicated by an overwhelming preference for Macs over PCs in publishing. The rest of the world is apparently more open.

Personally, I can see Internet access to rapidly searchable image banks, using X-Windows emulation or tools yet to be developed, superseding such dedicated systems within five years. Access to private, limited image storage will be replaced by global access to almost any kind of image in digital existance. Hasselblad don't share this viewpoint (yet) but have taken steps to ensure that everything they now produce will be compatible with such a scenario.

Hire studio, lower prices

Superb large hire studios in immaculate condition could be hired for �100 a day. Even a massive studio with infinity cove and a vehicle lift, with ground floor vehicle preparation area, was only �350. The latest Volvo cars were being photographed, one of them locked away during our visit, in a 'Sekret' room! You can hire a Leaf digital system with Hasselblad for 4,000 SEK a day, a Fujica GX680 with lens and back for 775 SEK (about �70, or $100) a day.

You can even hire the impossible, for film and TV or digital shoots - how about a 6000W HMI fresnel spot for 950 SEK a day? They have HMI lights from 200W to 12,000W in almost every variety. A 63-amp 12,000W HMI luminaire costs 1,950 SEK with an additional charge for actual timed use (strikes and restrikes, bulb life).

The retail area has a processing lab and an all-day, all-night bar serving excellent beer. When the shop closes, a steel barrier shutter descends, and the bar can stay open securely. Photographers can meet there (it will take 200 comfortably), hold seminars, talk to clients, refresh models, or just stay awake. I may add some pix to this section when the next roll comes back from Fuji.

Gothenburg at the moment is a low-cost city. Hotel prices are below London rates - even the best are around �65 a night - and the depreciation of the SEK has made pound or dollar exchange worth more. You could take a studio shoot to Gothenburg, hire YFO's facilities, have a great time (these people are friendly, speak superb English and enjoy company) while saving a small fortune on London, German or New York facility fees.

The actual name of this facility is Gamlestadens Fabriker Media Center, five minutes from Gothernburg city center. They can be contacted on Gotenburg 031 21 00 44, fax 031 19 00 49. Our Hasselblad friends did an excellent job showing us this model example of a superbly equipped, affordable hire, lab and retail complex - but my British colleagues forbade everyone from writing about this in our magazines, in case London lost business as a result...

So, I've left it right at the end of a long haul through an article which would be subbed to the bare bones if it ever appeared in PHOTOpro. We couldn't run such an indulgence! Your reward, if you are a photographer needing to know such things, is to learn that Sweden is a good place to spend money at the present time (secondhand Leica and Hasselblads are especially bon marche).

The devaluation of Swedish currency also helps explain that while Japanese camera prices have been rising every month in Britain, so that a Canon EOS-1n body now costs as much as a Leica, Hasselblad prices are staying put. You still pay more for a 501C plus 80mm than any professional SLR with 50mm lens, but it's a percentage more, not a factor of several times.

My thanks to Hasselblad for this and even more information which weighed us down on the way back, and will find its way into print - and for their efficient but easy-going Swedish hospitality and good cheer!

- DK

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