I got very excited when I heard the announcement. I thought to myself: Wow! A Hassy for under $10k! Great! Now, med format is approaching reasonable pricing and that's going to affect other manufacturers. I still think that.
However, the more I think about the camera itself, the more I fail to see the point of this camera. When the announcement came out, I immediately thought to myself: Mamiya 7! But there's a world of difference from the need that Mamiya 7 filled vs XD1. Mamiya 7 was a relatively small, light 6x7 film camera. What were the other choices? RB67 - a behemoth of a camera that couldn't be hand held for any period of time. The RZ67, a bit more manageable, but still a huge camera. Pentax 67, a big camera with a 1/30 sec sync speed, which made it unsuitable for flash photography unless the camera was on a tripod, shooting static objects. So, in that sense, the Mamiya 7 provided the benefit of the big 6x7 negative in a compact, light package with a leaf shutter that could sync at fast enough speeds.
Enter the XD1. What does it offer? Well, it's a crop med format, so the sensor isn't THAT much bigger than 35mm, so in that sense, it's still competing with the smaller formats, whereas the Mamiya 7 set itself completely apart from the smaller format competition. With the lines in terms of image quality blurred by digital, med format needs to be substantially bigger than competition in order to set itself apart. In other words, as far as I'm concerned, the 645 full frame is the SMALLEST that med format needs to be in order to be viable on a mass scale to the smaller format shooters.
Furthermore, the lenses that were introduced with this camera are slow. Combine that with a sensor that's not substantially bigger than 135 and what you have is a situation where the advantages of the bigger sensor such as the shallower depth of field will not be realized. So, who is this camera for? It's hard to say. I think most smaller frame shooters who want to explore the larger sensor will be drawn more toward the Pentax 645z because of
the availability of legacy lenses. That's huge. It's huge from a choice perspective, as well as from a financial perspective. Pentax users can have access to whatever lenses out there, which are available for a song. If those lenses aren't quite up to par, a bad lens is better than no lens. At least it can be used as a stop gap measure. That's not the case with XD1, since it doesn't have a FP shutter.
Those looking for a travel set are much more likely to pick up a smaller format camera due to weight and cost savings.
So, who is this camera for? Quite frankly, I'm not sure and I'm not sure it will necessarily be a success. We may see the XD line go by the way side in a few years. However, one thing that it will do and one thing that it has done already is move the MF costs closer to sanity.