Just for a moment Paul,
it feels strange,
when you write to me, I reply to you and you reply to me via a third party.
If I summarise briefly, Alpa is no longer a camera manufacturer but an advertising company that manufactures and sells cameras.
Now their actions also make sense to me.
Many camera models - from no adjustment to very large adjustments plus special models and quickly forgetting what they have ever made.
That might be great if you are a collector and can be bad if you need a repair.
I would like to praise Cambo and Arca, who are constantly improving their existing products without forgetting
They are true lovers of photography and you can see their expertise in the product.
Uwe
Let me explain more clearly – since its inception Alpa worked with Seitz Phototechnik – a (in Alpa's case: contract) manufacturer of photographic equipment that was mainly focused on panoramic camera setups. They have high precision CNC machinery, electrical engineering know-how, design implementation know-how etc. They also developed the FPS.
Alpa was an old Swiss camera brand which went bankrupt and then a marketing couple – already late-stage in their careers (I think the Capauls were both a bit older when they started) – had the idea to buy the brand name and to start a new kind of modern tech camera brand which would unify Swiss high quality mechanical engineering with medium format tech cam lenses as they were being developed by SK and Rodenstock. Aka Sironar digital, SK early-gen XL lenses, etc.
At the beginning the focus was both on film and the emerging digital backs.
This was a resounding success during the 2000s as the market exploded as digital backs were more and more seen as a replacement for film for professionals and coupled with the great new lenses from SK and Rodenstock the IQ was head and shoulders above what you could procude say with a Canon 5D MK I.
So Alpa would commission sell and market these products and commission new designs over time, like the Max, TC, Plus, Pano, FPS, etc.
In house or outsourced is not forcibly better or worse economically – just when the market shrinks and cash is king it is more expensive to innovate and ITERATE designs if you work with contract manufacturers instead of having a design lab in the other room. On the flip side you don't need to enterain a whole "R&D dept." and "CNC machine park" – which can, I guess, also cost a bit to operate if you don't make use of capacity around the clock.
To this day all major models besides the XY are still in production with parts available. They are cotinuosly produced by Seitz in batches.
The XY is the only exception here as it is so large and heacy and so overpowered in terms of shift that demand was not high over time so they discontinued it.
I personally find it a masterpiece, but it is really heavy, so I get why people prefer Max, TC.
So all Alpa cameras have been designed and are still manufactured to this day in Switzerland with parts available except for the XY which is a special product.
So I am not sure why you say it is for collectors. Everything is in stock – XY is just very niche. It weights a few KGs ... so it is not really your everyday on-location travel camera .... on top you need a stronger tripod to go with it ... so it becomes a bit unwiedly compared to modern setups, say an XT on a medium sized Gitzo.
That's why it has been discontinued a few years ago.
