Leica made a special, one of a kind S2 digital panoramic camera for Josef Koudelka

leica-s2-president-obama
In a recent interview with HuffingtonpostJosef Koudelka mentioned that Leica made a special, one of a kind digital panoramic camera:

Digital photography helped me to go ahead with my work. It helped me not to be dependent on sponsors which for my panoramic pictures I would usually have to be, even if just to buy the film, develop it and make the contact sheets. When Leica made a digital panoramic camera for me — which gave me a similar result to the analogue camera I was using before — I was very happy, because now I could pick up my camera, call my friends which I have all over the world, and just say, Can I sleep in your house? I made a few trips with both cameras in order to test the digital one. I found that on the last two trips I was actually taking more pictures, and enjoyed it more, when I was using the digital camera.

NYTimes posted something similar a while back – the panorama camera was based on the Leica S2 medium format version (pictured above):

I was using this Fuji panoramic — but the problem was everyone stopped developing the film. You can’t get 220 film anymore and you needed to carry about 35 kilograms extra. I went to Leica and they did one camera for me that was digital panoramic, which is this S2 camera, and they make two lines and set it on black and white. I made four trips with it together with the film camera. In the last two trips I realized I was taking more pictures with this Leica and I am enjoying it more. The result is very comparable. The lens was exactly the same.

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