Sic transit Horseman VH, 45HD, LE

[Oren Grad]

The Horseman VH, 45HD and LE have suddenly vanished from both the Horseman USA and Komamura Japan websites. I guess they're gone.

The 45FA, Woodman 45 and LX are still there...

[Ellis Vener]

i picked up a Horseman catalog at PMA 2006. these models are still listed. The chief Komamura designer who I met with said nothing about these cameras being discontinued butthey were showing medium format cameras and a beautiful stereo camera.

[Mark Sampson]

Isn't Horseman changing US distributors- from Schneider to Rollei? That could have something to do with it.

[Ellis Vener]

Rollei is out of the camera business. the cameras are now made by Franke & Heidecke GmbH. My impression from PMA where they shared a booth is that they are jointly represented.

[Oren Grad]

My guess is that they're gone, but with slow-moving equipment like this it may take a while before the inventories of equipment and of old catalogs are depleted. But we'll see. I should have put a question mark in my header for this thread.

The Horseman USA website is just a mirror of content from the Komamura Japan website, and this has always been the case even while Schneider was the distribtor.

Re the distributorship, here's the link again to the latest development:

www.letsgodigital.org/en/news/articles/story_6541.html

Basically, Komamura has long been the Rollei distributor in Japan. It looks like Komamura is taking over from Schneider in the US to set up their own distributorship here, and have agreed with Franke & Heidecke to include Rollei in the deal, and conceivably to integrate their product lines in more substantive ways as well, though the details on the latter are not yet clear.

The Horseman references have already been removed from the Schneider Optics site.

Ellis, do you know of any link to a picture of the Horseman 3D prototype?

[Oren Grad]

Ah, scratch that - I see that Ken Rockwell just posted a snap on his PMA roundup page...