Mamiya changing hands

Beginning September 1st, 2006, Mamiya will no longer be in the camera manufacturing business. They will be turning over any digital business to its subsidiary Cosmos Scientific Instruments, Inc. The MAC Group, the USA distributing arm of Mamiya will still be representing them in the American market and, officially, Cosmos Scientific and Mamiya say that for the consumer, things will be seamless.

Mamiya was a big maker of medium format cameras and took a healthy portion of the wedding and portrait photo business. Following the path of Bronica, number one in the wedding business for years, Mamiya blames their drop in sales on the growing numbers of professional photographers turning to digital SLRs for all of their work.

Digital SLRs have a BIG advantage in work flow compared to medium format cameras and post-processing film scanning. Most people want CDs chock full of pictures from their wedding or photo shoot and to supply that, medium format negatives must be scanned at high-resolution, which takes considerable time. After the scan, editing all of the visible dust in your images takes even longer. A single afternoon in a high-end lab can turn into a week-long delay in delivery of your images. With digital, if you get the exposure right in the camera, you can dump the pictures to your hard drive and burn a CD in a matter or minutes.

One by one, camera companies are dropping. Bronica, Minolta, and now Mamiya. For their part, Nikon has announced that they will no longer be producing film SLRs for the consumer market, concentrating on digital in the future.

At this point, Cosmos Scientific is confident that there is a future for this new transfer of assets. Observers are of mixed opinion. Some see writing on the wall. Others think that the future may just be in better hands. Guess we'll just have to wait and see.

--- Mickey Maguire