Obviously there are special purpose industrial and scientific cameras that might be more expensive, but when it comes to retail digital cameras is this the current king of the mountain?
I love that is doesn’t come with a memory card. Gotta protect that bottom line. 
Pretty sure a Phase One P65+ is more, but I can’t find it on any retail sites.
Says here the list price is $39,990. That’s just the digital back though, while the Hasselblad is a complete camera.
42 grand for a non-specialty camera? Whoa. That seems to be an absurd leap. Any notion of what it does differently from a high-end Sony/Canon/etc.?
Usually they tend to be cameras that are mounted on airplanes for recon, I think the hassie runs at 60 megapix, so the image can be blown up real good. Its probably what google earth uses for its service.
Declan
“Non-specialty” isn’t really accurate. It’s a medium format digital, which has larger sensor. Meaning it has much higher quality and more megapixels. (This one has 60, I think the highest full frame DSLR is Sony’s which has 24). Generally these are used for publishing magazines and books, where you need large high quality prints.
It has a much larger sensor. At 60 megapixels and 40.2 x 53.7mm size, it’s almost 3 times more pixels than the Canon 5D Mark II, and 2.3 times larger area. A CCD chip is a single semiconductor chip, so its price tends to scale exponentially with size. In addition, the electronics necessary to read out and process 60 million pixels in a reasonable amount of time (1.1 seconds for this Hasselblad) is not trivial.
I have to disagree about it being an aerial camera; as I understand it, aerial photography is usually done with cameras specifically designed for that purpose, like this. (Or this 196-megapixel monster which of course costs way more than $42k.) I believe this Hasselblad is intended for studio photography, e.g. commercial photographs for advertising.
Well, as scr4 notes, this is the sort of camera likely to be used for studio or location advertising shots, and other similar commercial work.
Someone doing that sort of photography probably isn’t even using a memory card; more likely, their images are being transferred directly to a computer.
Ah, I picked up from the OP that by “retail” he/she meant that it’s intended for the consumer market (not that some absurdly rich hobbyists out there wouldn’t take one on vacation with them). That it’s primarily used by professionals within a relatively small niche makes much more sense.
A friend of mine has one of these. He does do some studio work with it but also landscape and architectural stuff. He has sold some stuff to magazines but has a regular job and doesn’t consider himself a professional.
The large sized sensor (40x53mm) also means that the camera will have a smaller depth of field than a traditional DSLR (even a high-end full-frame DSLR with 24x36mm sensor). That means that you can, for instance, shoot a person standing on a blurred background (depth of field increases when you shot larger objects, so you can take a closer portrait with a blurry background with a APS-sized DSRL, but not an entire person).
In general, this camera might be one of the higher end medium format cameras, but it’s not out of line in terms of price. Most digital medium format SLR cameras are actually sold as two parts – the camera and the digital back.
The camera is essentially the box with the shutter, lens mount, some buttons, viewfinder prism and mirror and a place to mount a film or digital back. Often the cameras come with a standard lens (something like 80mm f/2.8), but sometimes they do not.
The digital back is typically the most expensive part of the system – it is the part that contains the image sensor, image transfer logic and the LCD display.
A professional medium format camera with a prime lens will be a few thousand dollars without a digital back. Something like the Rollei Hy6, Mamiya 645, Phase One 645 or the Hasselblad H2 – you can look these up. Without a film or digital back these will not be able to record any images.
An off-the-shelf medium format digital back will be somewhere between $7,000 and $40,000 depending on the resolution and features you desire. These are made by companies like Hasselblad, Leaf, Phase One, Mamiya, etc.
What the OP has linked to is a camera, lens and digital back being sold together. In fact, as far as I know, the H4D is a medium format system without a removable back – you cannot use it with film (I could be wrong). It might be the most expensive digital camera that is sold as a single kit, but it is definitely not the most expensive digital camera that somebody would use. For example, the same Hasselblad H4D-60 but with their 35-90mm zoom lens would probably be $5K more.
Typically this is not as much of a consideration because the maximum apertures in medium format lenses are rarely as big as on 35mm cameras. In fact, the 80mm f/2.8 on a 645 has a slightly greater depth of field than the standard 50mm f/1.4 on a 35mm sensor.
Well, sure, but adding on the most expensive lens you can find sort of unbalances the equation.
By that measure, a Nikon D40 with a 600/4 lens attached is a “more expensive camera” than a Nikon D3 with a standard lens. But that doesn’t really give a good indication of the relative abilities or costs of the two cameras themselves.
While these top end cameras are the exceptions, in general, glass can easily cost more than the camera body. People switch camera bodies more frequently than they switch good lenses.
Higher quality and increased megapixels don’t necessarily go together - at least in any way that would affect typical or even professional digital camera users (unless they need to take shots that will be blown up to billboard size).
Past a certain point (which we’ve probably already exceeded for most digital cameras on the market), megapixels become mostly a marketing tool. More important are things like color accuracy and ease of use. The supposedly improved focusing technology on the Hasselblad sounds nice, but not enough to make me want to whip out 42K for it, plus not wanting to figure out how to store all those supermegapixel images that I couldn’t tell from the ones taken with my 10 MP camera.
Yeah, unless your image is going to grace one of those 50-foot wide billboards, i really can’t imagine that the difference in image quality between, say, a Canon EOS-1DS Mk III or a Nikon D3x and the Hasselblad is likely to be noticeable to anyone. It certainly won’t be evident at regular magazine size, and probably not even at poster size.
And the file sizes! According to the Hasselblad fact sheet, RAW images from the camera are 80MB, and TIFFs are 180. I know that hard drive space is cheap these days, but a pro photographer would need a lot of disk space to deal with that sort of file size, especially once s/he starts processing those RAW files in Photoshop and saving the .PSD documents as part of the workflow.
Actually, billboards are relatively low resolution.
What this camera gives you is the ability to crop images without losing too much resolution. It’s also more of a “fine-art” camera, designed for making poster-sized prints that will be viewed closeup.
It’s not a photojournalist’s camera, nor is it designed to be taken on your vacation (although you could, if you didn’t mind lugging it around).
I would imagine the resolution requirements for a billboard are probably lower than a poster print. People are a lot less likely to walk up close to a billboard and start examining parts of it like they are with a large print.
Now I don’t really think it’s every necessary to have a 60MP camera, but I wouldn’t think it’s indistinguishable. A D3X will give you good poster sized prints, but H4D can be visibly better without whipping out a magnifying glass.
Well, i’d be interested to see a poster-size comparison between the H4D and the D3x. I’m not convinced that the difference would be noticeable without very close scrutiny.