Hasselblad H4D-60 Digital SLR - Is this the most expensive digital camera in the world?

[groman]

@mhendo

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.

All other image quality issues aside, the H3D-60 will give you approximately a 50% DPI boost over a D3X. That is approximately the same DPI increase as between a D3X and a D3. There’s always going to be image + print size combinations where this isn’t noticeable at all and some combinations that are.

However, my guess is that most people don’t just drop $40K on a camera because the resolution is better. They spend $40K because they can, because of the brand, because they like to show off, because they see real or imagined image quality differences, because they really like the aspect ratio, etc.

[Francis_Vaughan]

As a long time medium format user, I think people who assert that this camera will be hard to tell from a high end Canon or Nikon would be rather surprised at just how good the results can be.

There are few interesting issues.

Common small sensor digital cameras show no useful gain in resolution above about 10Mp except under the most perfect of shooting circumstances. The size of the individual pixels on the sensor is so small that noise becomes a significant issue, and often there is no additional information added to the picture with more pixels. The race to higher and higher pixel counts was pure marketing, and has thankfully mostly stopped. Just comparing the raw number of pixels between cameras has always been more about marketing than pixel quality.

However the medium format sensors have pixels that are huge. As a rough approximation they are the same size as those in the high end full frame 35mm equivalent sensors used in the Canons and Nikons. It is just that you have a sensor that is three times the area. So the sensor has essentially the same sensitivity and noise performance.

The other clear limitation of final image quality is in the optics. There are no second rate optics in the medium format cameras. You get lenses from Leica, Zeiss, Mamiya. These optics have no peer, and are typically at the leading edge of optical technology. Usually they are designed with the professional photographer in mind - leaf shutters are common, allowing fast flash sync for studio work with useful depth of field control. They are usually large, heavy and mind numbingly expensive.

So, as a real quality issue, they provide as good as, if not better image quality as a top end 35mm derived digital camera if you took three shots with the 35mm equvalent and stitched them together side by side.

As to whether this resolution is needed. It depends. For glossy magazine work it most certainly is. One place where film has never died is here. Professionals world wide still shoot medium format film because there are uses for which no 35mm equvalent digital camera can provide the results. At least not without sigificant digital processing to provide the illusion of higher resolution.

There will always be a few moneyed enthusiasts that want to buy the most expensive toy, but these cameras are large heavy, complex, and not something one takes around to pose with. (A Leica M9 would fit the bill for that.)

It might be said that getting the quality these cameras are capable of isn’t trivial either. They have so much resolution that a tripod is usually needed in all but the brightest light, and care and effort is needed in focussing.

Personally I lust after a Leica S2. But I have been very happy with a Mamiya 645 and Fujica 646Zi with film. It costs me nearly $2 a shot in film and processing now. But I can scan the results at well over 30Mp and still not get to the resolution the film provides.

[pulykamell]

@Francis_Vaughan

As to whether this resolution is needed. It depends. For glossy magazine work it most certainly is.

Your 12 MP dSLR, not to mention the 18MP and 24MP ones, provide way more than enough resolution for a glossy magazine. 12MP gives you an 8"x12" at 300 dpi. 24MP gets you to about 13"x19". What do you need more resolution for in a magazine?

One place where film has never died is here. Professionals world wide still shoot medium format film because there are uses for which no 35mm equvalent digital camera can provide the results. At least not without sigificant digital processing to provide the illusion of higher resolution.

As for medium format film, shot on Velvia, vs. a 24MP dSLR, from what I’ve seen, the D3x has better image quality in terms of sharpness, color, and noise/grain. My personal opinion is the high-megapixel professional dSLRs are on par with medium format film, if not surpassing them. Heck, people were saying that about the 16.7MP 1Ds Mark II a few years ago.

However, the digital medium format cameras/backs certainly surpass what the digital dSLRs can do, and it is noticeable in a large print. But I don’t expect everybody to be able to see the difference. It’ll be obvious to you and me, but not everyone appreciates the added detail you get from a beautiful large reproduction of medium format.

[scr4]

@pulykamell

Your 12 MP dSLR, not to mention the 18MP and 24MP ones, provide way more than enough resolution for a glossy magazine. 12MP gives you an 8"x12" at 300 dpi. …

I don’t think it’s that simple. A “12MP” camera has 6 million green pixels, 3 million red pixels and 3 million blue pixels. Even if we accept that each green pixel can be converted into a full color pixel (using the green value for intensity, and using the surrounding red/blue pixels for saturation and hue), that’s only 250 pixels per inch at 8"x12". And I don’t know much about the printing process, but I don’t think a “dot” is equivalent to a pixel, is it? Also, all this is assuming that you don’t crop the image at all, which is very unlikely.

[groman]

@scr4

I don’t think it’s that simple. A “12MP” camera has 6 million green pixels, 3 million red pixels and 3 million blue pixels. Even if we accept that each green pixel can be converted into a full color pixel (using the green value for intensity, and using the surrounding red/blue pixels for saturation and hue)

While the information represented by 12 million bayer pixels is definitely not the same resolution as 12 million full color pixels over the same area would have been, after proper demosaicing it will be higher than 6 million you are using for your calculation. I do not have a citation at the moment, but depending on your resolution metric it should be fairly close to 12.

[pulykamell]

@scr4

I don’t think it’s that simple. A “12MP” camera has 6 million green pixels, 3 million red pixels and 3 million blue pixels. Even if we accept that each green pixel can be converted into a full color pixel (using the green value for intensity, and using the surrounding red/blue pixels for saturation and hue), that’s only 250 pixels per inch at 8"x12". And I don’t know much about the printing process, but I don’t think a “dot” is equivalent to a pixel, is it? Also, all this is assuming that you don’t crop the image at all, which is very unlikely.

Magazines are usually printed at 150 lpi or 175 lpi. The general rule is the image resolution should be twice the screen ruling for optimum reproduction (300 dpi - 350 dpi). I would be shocked if a drum-scanned film medium-format image contains more discernible detail than a 12MP digital image as a full-page 8.5"x11" in a standard-sized magazine.

And not cropping is not that unlikely. If you’re doing portraits or studio shots, there shouldn’t be much cropping at all. Photographers generally strive to capture the image as “full-frame” as possible, in order to maximize resolution. Also, it used to be a sort of point of bragging to print up your film with the frame edges included, as a way to say: “See, I framed the picture so perfectly, it doesn’t need cropping.” News and sports photos, yes, cropped to hell and back usually.

Most of the images you see in magazines have a digital, not film, source. There may be some fashion and commercial photographers who use medium format (and a lot of these people have gone to digital MF), but the vast majority of images in the printed media are digital.

[pipper]

@Oukile

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).

I don’t think this is true. DOF is a product of the lens and aperature being used. The sensor size shouldn’t have an impact.

[Telemark]

@pipper

I don’t think this is true. DOF is a product of the lens and aperature being used. The sensor size shouldn’t have an impact.

This is incorrect. The geometry of the sensor size directly affects DOF. You may be used to 35mm film where every camera had the same sized target.

Online Depth of Field Calculator

[pulykamell]

@pipper

I don’t think this is true. DOF is a product of the lens and aperature being used. The sensor size shouldn’t have an impact.

This is kind of semantical. When comparing identical fields of view, the camera with the larger sensor will have a lower depth of field at a given aperture. So, if you compare a 50mm on a 35mm camera vs an 80mm on a 6"x6" (both “normal” lenses for the formats), the 6"x6" photo will have less DOF at the same aperture. Or, if you compare 50mm lens on a full-frame camera vs. a 50mm lens on a 1.5x crop sensor (so you have to step back several feet to get the same field of view), you will have less DOF with the full-frame camera, because of your closer subject distance (assuming you’re not hyperfocal.)

Read the DOF vs format size here.

For the common “same picture” comparison, i.e., the same camera position and angle of view, DOF is, to a first approximation, inversely proportional to format size

[…]

To maintain the same angle of view, the lens focal lengths must be in proportion to the format sizes. Assuming, for purposes of comparison, that the 4×5 format is four times the size of 35 mm format, if a 4×5 camera used a 300 mm lens, a 35 mm camera would need a 75 mm lens for the same field of view. For the same f-number, the image made with the 35 mm camera would have four times the DOF of the image made with the 4×5 camera.

[…]

Many small-format digital SLR camera systems allow using many of the same lenses on both full-frame and “cropped format” cameras. If the subject distance is adjusted to provide the same field of view at the subject, at the same f-number and final-image size, the smaller format has more DOF, as with the “same picture” comparison above. But the pictures from the two formats will differ because of the different angles of view and the different viewpoints.