{"id":22,"date":"2006-01-13T19:30:17","date_gmt":"2006-01-14T00:30:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/photondetector.com\/blog\/?p=22"},"modified":"2006-04-04T16:52:30","modified_gmt":"2006-04-04T21:52:30","slug":"discontinued-xpan-rumor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/photondetector.com\/blog\/2006\/01\/13\/discontinued-xpan-rumor\/","title":{"rendered":"Unconfirmed rumor: Hasselblad discontinue XPan II panoramic rangefinder"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"fb-root\"><\/div>\n<p>According to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.photo.net\/bboard\/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00Epp6\">this post<\/a> on <a href=\"http:\/\/photo.net\/\">photo.net<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hasselbladusa.com\/\">Hasselblad<\/a> have discontinued the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.xpan.com\/\">XPan II<\/a> and have limited stock on hand. I will call Hasselblad on Monday, 16 January 2006 and attempt to confirm with them directly.<\/p>\n<p>While I think it&#8217;s a damn shame, I&#8217;m not surprised, either. While I haven&#8217;t used the XPan II, I have and love the original. It&#8217;s built like a brick shithouse, the controls are perfectly laid out for me (except the panoramic\/normal 24&#215;36 selecter, which is a pain, but it <em>should<\/em> be considering what it does), has modern film loading, winds the entire roll out when it loads and rewinds exposed film into the cartridge (why the hell doesn&#8217;t every camera do this? If the back opens, I&#8217;d much rather lose blank film rather than frames I&#8217;ve already shot!), and has the best in-camera meter I&#8217;ve ever used.<\/p>\n<p>But! The lenses, the lenses! Only three, slow, expensive lenses (the 30mm weighs in at a hefty US $3000). (30mm f\/5.6 (slower with the required center filter), 45mm f\/4, and 90mm f\/4.) By Leica (yes, I&#8217;m going there) standards, the 45 and 90 are reasonably priced at $594 and $730, respectively (pricing from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bhphotovideo.com\/bnh\/controller\/home?O=NavBar&#038;A=search&#038;Q=&#038;ci=5526\">B&amp;H<\/a>). It seems that Hasselblad missed an opportunity to take a bite out of Leica&#8217;s ass with this system. I&#8217;m its perfect target market: I shoot film, dig manual focus rangefinders, want aperture priority AE, and belive that if I&#8217;m going to spend that kind of money, I should get post stone-age film loading and a shutter with accuracy of greater than 1\/3 stop and would have happily bought faster lenses were they available. I think there are more of us out there.<\/p>\n<p>And while I&#8217;m perfectly willing to push film to 128000, f\/4 is still slow. Even putting aside the obscene price of the 30mm, the required center filter brings it down to almost f\/11. I don&#8217;t think Hasselblad considered the possibility that anyone would want to use the camera indoors, which is a shame. Until I got into the Contax G2 system (which I love but wouldn&#8217;t have done had I had faster lenses to choose from!), it was my take-everywhere, joined-at-the-hip, disappeared-in-my-hands camera, and I loved it. Except the low light thing. (Well then why the hell did I get into the system in the first place? I inherited it.)<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, I&#8217;m sad to see it go. It&#8217;s a great camera. Almost everyone I know who&#8217;s actually spent some time with one loves it. Bye bye, XPan!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>According to this post on photo.net, Hasselblad have discontinued the XPan II and have limited stock on hand. I will call Hasselblad on Monday, 16 January 2006 and attempt to confirm with them directly. While I think it&#8217;s a damn shame, I&#8217;m not surprised, either. While I haven&#8217;t used the XPan II, I have and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[281,477,735,1295,1906,1907],"class_list":["post-22","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-product-news","tag-camera","tag-discontinued","tag-hasselblad","tag-panoramic","tag-xpan","tag-xpan-ii"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/photondetector.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/photondetector.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/photondetector.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photondetector.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photondetector.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/photondetector.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/photondetector.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photondetector.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photondetector.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<!-- WP Super Cache is installed but broken. 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