Daniel, Hasselblad brought a prototype to photokina in Germany last September, to New York, in October, & to a number of other camera shows since. It was not the finalized version of the camera, but it was finished enough to get a good idea. The main thing missing was the LED symols in the viewfinder for selected shutter speeds and the warnings for out of range shutter speeds & low battery.
I have stayed in touch with Hasselblad in Sweden since with numerous questions. They tell me that changes have been made since the development of the prototype, but that they are internal. I highly recommend contacting Hasselblad with any questions. They unfailingly respond within one business day & are exceedingly patient with even the smallest inquiries.
My impressions at the time were that the viewfinder is the cameras biggest asset. It is the largest & brightest of any rangefindeer I have seen. And I could walk right over to the Leica booth & look through the viewfinder of an M7 immediately afterwards. On the ZI, the 28 mm frame lines were easily viewable even with my glasses on. The viewfinder is parallax corrected even for the 28 mm frame lines, which are used with the Zeiss lens that focuses down to 0.5 meters (19.5 inches). The other thing that impressed me was the rangefinder. With its long effective base length, lenses mounted on the camera snapped right into focus. Bingo!
Build quality seemed comparable other recent, all metal Cosina bodies like the Bessa R2/3A, which are quite good. Like those bodies, it uses some plastic internal parts. The take-up spool, for example, can be easily seen to be platic as can the back door lock - an added feature which the Bessa bodies do not have. Frankly, the back door lock looked a little flimsy to me. The film advance lever & frame selector lever on the front ot the body both seemed a little thin to me. The frame selector mechanism was not working properly when I saw it - it only held the frame lines loosely in place so both frame lines were sometines displayed. This was only a prototype & the camera had been handled by hundreds of people (at least) in at least two different camera shows by that time. Who knows if it had been dropped, kicked, bumped, etc. Bottm line, however, is that I would have like these features to have been sturdier.
I will be looking for user reports re these features when the camera gets into circulation. The test for this camera will be to see how well Zeiss & Cosina have paid attention to detail. Most of the problems I have seen reported with Cosina cameras have not been due to poor build quality but to quality control & damage in shipping. In this regard, I think that the role of Zeiss in the partnership is very important. QC is one of the things they are good at, so I hope that there will be improvement in this area. I hope that the testing process will be rigorous so that little details like the ones I pointed out will be addressed if they don't hold up in testing. Finally, I hope that everything will be buttoned down tightly when the cameras are packaged & shipped. These standards should be in place as part of the higher cost that this camera is selling for. In the most recent article on the Zeiss page that yo so kindly linked, Zeiss says that they wanted to build a camera that will be rugged. I hope that they have & that's what I will be expecting. I will be disappointed if they fail to meet this goal.
