Hasselblad discontinues Repair & Support Services

[Greg]

Perfectly usable Imacon 4040s (for product work) were selling for
$2-4,000 US a year ago are now selling for under a thousand dollars. See eBay item number: 200924565617. Eight bidders ran the price up to $655.50. Is it a coincidence that last year Hasselblad announced they were no longer servicing 4040 digital backs?

To be fair to Hasselblad I think it's a bit much to expect much support for SCSI products these days..

Nick-T

True,

But H3; not so much!

Greg

[Dustbak]

I shoot my HB's every day and everyday my H4 hangs at least once shooting tethered even with the new grey cables.

Ray I wonder why you are having these crashes, obviously you are no newbie!

I'm still using a Granite digital 10M (the one with the heavy magnetic things on it) from Macpro (back port) > Granite digital unpowered hub > lightweight 60CM cable to camera.

I basically have zero problems.

I am not sure why these happen. I now use the new angled grey cables which indeed are somewhat better. You can imagine that I have tried every configuration that we have seen over the years, none seemed to present the solution. The new cables were my big hope but unfortunately not.  I have learned to live with it but would love to see this completely gone. It is annoying that I often have to remove the battery and completely need to restart the camera before it reconnects again. This has been the case since the beginning.

[Monty Rakusen]

Yes I have the same. Its usually once a day and requires everything to be restarted. Its usually frames not loading so I'm losing shots. I've stopped upgrading Phocus on the Macbook Pro as this seems to introduce more problems.
I've been shooting Hass since the Imacon 132C and to be honest the tethered situation has always been a problem. It was much worse with the 39 and the 50 is a little better. Its just about liveable with...you should try shooting with the D800 tethered! Ha!
Monty

[Chris Gahran]

Perfectly usable Imacon 4040s (for product work) were selling for
$2-4,000 US a year ago are now selling for under a thousand dollars. See eBay item number: 200924565617. Eight bidders ran the price up to $655.50. Is it a coincidence that last year Hasselblad announced they were no longer servicing 4040 digital backs?

To be fair to Hasselblad I think it's a bit much to expect much support for SCSI products these days..

Nick-T

I agree if you have an electronic or mechanical failure your Back becomes a paper weight. But you can't replace the IR filter. Secondly it's a software program the gets the CCD calibrated and creates the Black Calibration file that are written into the Back and you can't get that service done.

Chris

[KeithL]

Sorry, my mistake. I just read 'H3D-22 and H3D-39' in the first post at the top and forgot there was a I and II series. I wrongly assumed ALL H3 series support was stopping...

Just to be clear, I've now had it confirmed by Hasselblad that H3D II series cameras are still supported and can be seviced in Sweden.

[Alex]

Oh dear, Have just stumbled across this thread and I'm worried now: although luckily for me I'm on an H3DMKII, I can see that it will have it's time - as a multishot I have to send it back to Sweden every 5 months because of the amount of dust that gets onto the sensor because of the crap seals, without that support it'll be cheaper to shoot on something else.

I guess like others I'm interested in what others are thinking of doing with the lenses: i.e changing to an H4X and using Phase or changing to Leica S et adaptor.
Will the newer 24, 28, 50MKII & 35-90 digital lenses work with either the H4XPhase, an H2Phase or a Leica S & adaptor setups?

BTW the Firewire 800 + laptop issue a lot of us are experiencing may have much to do with power demand from the camera: Firewire 800 has a signal stream & and power stream and with the Macbook setup the camera can suck a lot of power from the computer (as well as the cam battery). If there is the slightest of loss in power transmission between the two then the whole setup locks up at both ends and one has to 0 everything and start from scratch. It's a case of keeping that power regulated so that one doesn't get surges. I remember using Macbooks with an Express34 port and a USB power supply adaptor (helps keep everything regulated) to run a 5 & 5m FW800 extension & cable. I discovered this when the camera started writing off motherboards on a desktop because of the camera trying to take more power than it could handle; I started using a cable with a choke which helped to stop the suck-back (hence why Granite are so good). When I moved over to using a PC laptop with an Express34 FW800 adaptor (because of the whole Phocus + Graphics card issue), the laptop didn't supply power to the camera only data feed and so the camera was forced to use more of its own battery power: I was burning 50% more battery grips than before, but as well as the laptop battery issue lasting longer I noticed that I had a lot less lock-ups (going from 3x a shoot to 1x every 4 shoots), and these only happened because I didn't replace the cam battery before it had run out: With Phocus 2.7.1/3/4 now if I pull out the cable of either end and plug it back in I have no issues reconnecting.

I laugh because I can't believe it's taken 5 years to get rid of that cable itch (the 2K D800 was a dream when I tethered into C1 (10m USB3), pity it's not 16bit, otherwise I could save muchos $$)

[Roger Méndez]

In one way I´m not surprised with Hasselblad as I've been seeing how they have done things during all these years. I don't want to bore every one, but since I bought My first H1D I have always felt sad how they put months later the value of the camera you bought few thousands of euros/dollars lower because they were launching soon a brand new model. The only improvements I could see is number of pixels, HCD lenses and software. Some how they always trie to limit some way the lenses and software to latest models. These things don't happen with brands like Nikon or Canon which are much cheaper gear, but they always think in most of there general customer. With Hasselblad I'm afraid to say that this is not there policy. Same as others, I'll start changing from Hasselblad to another reliable brand, possible Leica or Phase One..... Hasselblad is caving his own hole.....

[pedro39photo]

this will hit the second hand market price like a hammer...its start to be difficult to ask 4500$ or less for a H3D 39 mark I if at any time it will be paper height for a small mechanical malfuncion like a 10$ power button...