p.27 #1 · Official: Hasselblad X1D-50c Medium Format Mirrorless
No I was just saying this is a world class sensor folks have nothing to worry about. Was not directing my comment in any specific direction.
gdanmitchell wrote:
DR did not increase because pixels got smaller, but despite the shrinking of photo site dimensions and increase in their density — through other advances in sensor design that allowed simultaneous downsizing of photo sites (and reduction of space between them) and other improvements in chip design and software that have affected dynamic range/noise.
When all else is equal, larger photo sites still have the advantage of being able to record a larger range of luminosity levels — e.g. more dynamic range. Current MF sensors benefit from this (and the other advances) in the same ways that smaller sensors do.
And I don't understand where you get the idea that I'm "worrying about the quality of this sensor."! I said nothing of the sort — though if wrote something in error and you can point me to it I'll edit to clarify. My only point was that potential users need to consider a range of things when they contemplate moving to a larger format. Again, that seems pretty non-controversial, right?
p.27 #2 · Official: Hasselblad X1D-50c Medium Format Mirrorless
killersnowman wrote:
As Guy pointed out in the above post, the P45+ is old, and apparently has a less than modern sensor. I believe the spec sheet for the P45+ states 12 stops of dynamic range and 16 bit colors. Ive found the actual dynamic range when converting a RAW in Capture one to be more than i would ever need and to be very natural in its rendering.
Here is one example of a single raw file converted in C1. Exposed for the highlights with NO grad filters on the camera. I know Jim has argued that the foreground is a bit too dark but i think it looks natural. There is data to pulled from it but i didn't
What do you mean by natural looking. Surely when you looked at this scene with your eyes, the foreground was not that dark and featureless. I don't get what you mean by natural.
p.27 #3 · Official: Hasselblad X1D-50c Medium Format Mirrorless
Yes and no . Problem is the larger photo site sensors also had less DR so it had more punch. But you are correct of holding more data but those sensors had far less DR so shadow areas blocked up more and less range. In turn it had a lot of punch. My old P25 was I think 9.2 but the DR was very low but the color jumped off the screen. A lot of folks like those fat pixel sensors because of it . Anyone remember the Mamiya ZD I think it was called. Like the P25 color was great but shadow noise was pretty bad plus ISO best you could get was ISO 200.
Fred Miranda wrote:
My theory is that bigger pixels allows for a stronger color filter array which translates to better tonal range and color response. All things being equal, MF sensors will always have the advantage.
p.27 #4 · Official: Hasselblad X1D-50c Medium Format Mirrorless
Geez, I hope people would consider a range of things before plopping down a cool $15,000 for a camera and a few lenses. I think we sometimes forget who the audience is of these types of threads....not your normal Mom & Pop...and maybe we should leave the discussions at the level of the audience and not play down the discussion or lecture to the newbie's.
p.27 #5 · Official: Hasselblad X1D-50c Medium Format Mirrorless
GMPhotography wrote:
Yes and no . Problem is the larger photo site sensors also had less DR so it had more punch.
That was a function of the technology available at the time when older sensors were made. With sensors using the same technology, larger photo sites always provide the potential for more dynamic range. It is a matter of physics...
The cool thing is that a full frame sensor made today can outperform, in many but not quite all ways, a medium format sensor using older technology. The sensor resolution of today's smaller cameras equals (or exceeds!) that of MF digital systems from not that long ago. Dynamic range is the same or potentially better. Noise can be extremely low.
It is correct to point out that all of the technological advances that made this possible are also available in MF digital systems, albeit at high cost and with some other practical considerations to think about. That means that the MF systems of today are still capable of exceeding the performance (in most ways) of smaller sensors... though the floor now is where the ceiling was not that long ago.
As I keep writing, I think it is good to understand the meaning of these improvements — for whom might they be important and how, and for whom might they provide little or no real advantage and even some potential disadvantages. That is not knocking MF, simply acknowledging that the value of such things may be relative.
p.27 #6 · Official: Hasselblad X1D-50c Medium Format Mirrorless
I'm not lecturing to anyone but if you want to talk MF the audience needs to understand what is involved in very high end sensors . But if you think I'm lecturing I'm history. That's not what I am doing . I'm trying to help your 15 grand wisely. This is not for everyone far from it.
chez wrote:
Geez, I hope people would consider a range of things before plopping down a cool $15,000 for a camera and a few lenses. I think we sometimes forget who the audience is of these types of threads....not your normal Mom & Pop...and maybe we should leave the discussions at the level of the audience and not play down the discussion or lecture to the newbie's.
p.27 #7 · Official: Hasselblad X1D-50c Medium Format Mirrorless
Exactly Dan those sensors are now pretty much put in the back shelf but still in use by some. Really great IQ for its time
gdanmitchell wrote:
That was a function of the technology available at the time when older sensors were made. With sensors using the same technology, larger photo sites always provide the potential for more dynamic range. It is a matter of physics...
The cool thing is that a full frame sensor made today can outperform, in many but not quite all ways, a medium format sensor using older technology. The sensor resolution of today's smaller cameras equals (or exceeds!) that of MF digital systems from not that long ago. Dynamic range is the same or potentially better. Noise can be extremely low.
It is correct to point out that all of the technological advances that made this possible are also available in MF digital systems, albeit at high cost and with some other practical considerations to think about. That means that the MF systems of today are still capable of exceeding the performance (in most ways) of smaller sensors... though the floor now is where the ceiling was not that long ago.
p.27 #9 · Official: Hasselblad X1D-50c Medium Format Mirrorless
As would be our 36 MP and 51MP and perhaps others, too. :-)
GMPhotography wrote:
Dan back to your comment . Yes our 42mpx sensor would be far better than the old MFdensors. But MF keeps pushing forward to. Great stuff
p.27 #10 · Official: Hasselblad X1D-50c Medium Format Mirrorless
GMPhotography wrote:
I'm not lecturing to anyone but if you want to talk MF the audience needs to understand what is involved in very high end sensors . But if you think I'm lecturing I'm history. That's not what I am doing . I'm trying to help your 15 grand wisely. This is not for everyone far from it.
Guy...post was not targeted at you in any way. Just a general observation that some people, not you, love to lecture everyone as if we are all newbies. This just gets a little tiring especially when the topic or equipment being discussed is advanced.
p.27 #12 · Official: Hasselblad X1D-50c Medium Format Mirrorless
I don't usually do this but I am copying a comment from a member robertwright
Managed to get ahold of one today at Fotocare's demo day. Obviously demo software, so it is just a teaser.
The size, weight and balance and feeling are all first rate. The build quality on the body is excellent. Touch screen is snappy even in demo, pinch to zoom, double tap to 100%, lots of good things already.
Autofocus was still a work in progress, didn't try focus peaking but you might be able to manually focus this even without it. Viewfinder is not enormous but had decent eye relief, but they need to address the information layout and legibility.
Camera is quiet, the shutter is definite. Could not assess the blackout time between frames in demo software but I hope it's brief like the Sonys.
Overall the feeling was just right, so they got that going for them. The details will be where it either becomes amazing or just ok. But they seem to have most of it sussed out and its seems intuitive, not overly complex and everyone was saying how the heft and feel were spot on.
p.27 #13 · Official: Hasselblad X1D-50c Medium Format Mirrorless
Since the subject of comparisons to a 35mm sensor came up I thought I would share a crop of a Pentax 645z vs 5DSR comparison I did earlier this year. I never published my results before because I never got around to processing the files; suffice to say that I did a quick examination when I shot the photos and found the 5DSR was close enough to the 645Z to lead me to conclude that the 645Z's size and cost was not justified vs the 5DSR. Here are 100% crops from near the center of two files I processed:
Both were shot with equal exposure, manually focused with a magnifying loupe in LV, and shot with the best vibration-suppression options provided by each body (5DSR = LV with EFCS, 645Z outside of LV to avoid double-shutter vibration and with MLUP). Both files were processed in LR using equal sharpening settings (which may or may not be fair considering pixel size differences) - sharpening was 37/0.7/37. This is an infinity subject at Lake Tahoe over about a mile of the lake.
p.27 #15 · Official: Hasselblad X1D-50c Medium Format Mirrorless
Snapsy,
do you feel this sample shot was enough to push either sensor? Obviously we are only looking at a crop of the overall scene but this doesn't look like a difficult thing for either camera. Since resolution is essentially the same we need to be looking for other differences.
I would think the test needs to be whether there is a situation in which the Canon sensor can't record the whole range of tones scene that the Pentax can or versa visa. I think we all accept that 90-95% of the time any 35mm sensor will be enough and that going bigger is a diminishing return for the last 5-10%.
thanks for the test though. That Canon sure does hold a ton of detail.
p.27 #17 · Official: Hasselblad X1D-50c Medium Format Mirrorless
snapsy wrote:
Since the subject of comparisons to a 35mm sensor came up I thought I would share a crop of a Pentax 645z vs 5DSR comparison I did earlier this year. I never published my results before because I never got around to processing the files; suffice to say that I did a quick examination when I shot the photos and found the 5DSR was close enough to the 645Z to lead me to conclude that the 645Z's size and cost was not justified vs the 5DSR.
Preface: I'm intrigued by mini MF cameras like the Hasselblad, though I'm more likely to end up with a successor to the Pentax 645z at some point. So I'm not dissing medium format digital or new Hasselblad, which seems like an innovative and worthy product.
But I have a story a bit like yours.
Earlier in this thread I mentioned a friend who was long a LF film photographer of some repute. (I don't drag my friend's names into FM discussions, but if you follow me on FB you might be able to make a guess.) We're in a little print review group that meets regularly to critique one another's work, and he used one of these sessions to conduct a little experiment on us. (All of us are experienced photographers and printers who do our own work all the way from capture to print.)
During our "pre-game" (when we socialize a bit before getting down to the business of looking at prints) he put out some pairs of prints on the table and just asked us to compare and comment on anything we noticed. The images were pretty boring — simply test photographs of his neighborhood, though selected to provide some image challenges — but we all set to work poring over them very carefully. In the end we felt that there were differences between the paired prints, but we were unable to state categorically what they were or even agree on which samples were best.
He then explained what we were looking at. One set had been shot with his 80MP Phase One back on his Mamiya body and one of his MF lenses. The other had been shot on a D810 (or was it a D800e?) using the Nikon 80-400mm zoom. All of the captures had been resized to produce 30" x 40" prints and subjected to his typical post-processing workflow. Then he cropped letter-sized sections out of the larger images and printed them on 8.5" x 11" paper. So we had been looking at sections from 30" x 40" prints, and inspecting them very carefully.
Now I don't claim that a 36MP file from a full frame camera, produced using a zoom lens is the equal of a 80MP file produced on a large medium format back. There are measurable differences. However, they are not very large differences in quite a few cases, at least from anything I've seen.
To be fair, one of the other folks in the group feels differently about this. We were discussing his Hasselblad based MF system, the new Hasselblad system that was just announced, the Pentax 645z, the A7rII, the 36MP Nikons, and the Canon 5DsR... and he remains convinced that the 645z, much less the full frame cameras, can't produce image quality that stands up.
I think that all of us would agree that the measurable differences exist but are very small. What we disagree about is the importance of those differences and the specific situations in which one option might be better than the others.
Let me bracket this by saying that all of us were very interested in the new mirrorless Hasselblad system, both for its own merits and for the prospect of less expensive and even better cameras.
p.27 #18 · Official: Hasselblad X1D-50c Medium Format Mirrorless
flash wrote:
Snapsy,
do you feel this sample shot was enough to push either sensor? Obviously we are only looking at a crop of the overall scene but this doesn't look like a difficult thing for either camera. Since resolution is essentially the same we need to be looking for other differences.
I would think the test needs to be whether there is a situation in which the Canon sensor can't record the whole range of tones scene that the Pentax can or versa visa. I think we all accept that 90-95% of the time any 35mm sensor will be enough and that going bigger is a diminishing return for the last 5-10%.
thanks for the test though. That Canon sure does hold a ton of detail.
Gordon...Show more →
Hi Gordon. For this test I was only interested in resolving ability since I already knew the 645Z's has the highest DR of any < $10k camera available and I had already compared the 645Z to the D810 for DR as well. Even though the resolution of the 5DSR and 645Z is the same the 645Z could be expected to resolve better (assuming ideal lenses on both) due to the lower resolving requirements from the lens on a per-area basis (LP/mm).
p.27 #19 · Official: Hasselblad X1D-50c Medium Format Mirrorless
gdanmitchell wrote:
Preface: I'm intrigued by mini MF cameras like the Hasselblad, though I'm more likely to end up with a successor to the Pentax 645z at some point. So I'm not dissing medium format digital or new Hasselblad, which seems like an innovative and worthy product.
But I have a story a bit like yours.
Earlier in this thread I mentioned a friend who was long a LF film photographer of some repute. (I don't drag my friend's names into FM discussions, but if you follow me on FB you might be able to make a guess.) We're in a little print review group that meets regularly to critique one another's work, and he used one of these sessions to conduct a little experiment on us. (All of us are experienced photographers and printers who do our own work all the way from capture to print.)
During our "pre-game" (when we socialize a bit before getting down to the business of looking at prints) he put out some pairs of prints on the table and just asked us to compare and comment on anything we noticed. The images were pretty boring — simply test photographs of his neighborhood, though selected to provide some image challenges — but we all set to work poring over them very carefully. In the end we felt that there were differences between the paired prints, but we were unable to state categorically what they were or even agree on which samples were best.
He then explained what we were looking at. One set had been shot with his 80MP Phase One back on his Mamiya body and one of his MF lenses. The other had been shot on a D810 (or was it a D800e?) using the Nikon 80-400mm zoom. All of the captures had been resized to produce 30" x 40" prints and subjected to his typical post-processing workflow. Then he cropped letter-sized sections out of the larger images and printed them on 8.5" x 11" paper. So we had been looking at sections from 30" x 40" prints, and inspecting them very carefully.
Now I don't claim that a 36MP file from a full frame camera, produced using a zoom lens is the equal of a 80MP file produced on a large medium format back. There are measurable differences. However, they are not very large differences in quite a few cases, at least from anything I've seen.
To be fair, one of the other folks in the group feels differently about this. We were discussing his Hasselblad based MF system, the new Hasselblad system that was just announced, the Pentax 645z, the A7rII, the 36MP Nikons, and the Canon 5DsR... and he remains convinced that the 645z, much less the full frame cameras, can't produce image quality that stands up.
I think that all of us would agree that the measurable differences exist but are very small. What we disagree about is the importance of those differences and the specific situations in which one option might be better than the others.
Let me bracket this by saying that all of us were very interested in the new mirrorless Hasselblad system, both for its own merits and for the prospect of less expensive and even better cameras.
Well I don't think I could argue that point as sometimes you just don't see it. But we are also let's say talking for argument sake they are 16x20 inches and at that range your really not seeing how big a 80mpx sensor can go. Now if we switched the conversation to like 6 or 7 feet wide than yes the 80 Mpx sensor will take the lead. Okay forget the prints for a second and I kind of said this all along yes there is a difference but it's also a subtle one depending on the image as well. It's certainly not night and day. I think one has to be careful how things are interpreted too. I try to be a little more conservative about it and avoid words like huge or smioking it. It's there no question and if you have a good eye you will see it. Than again a lot of folks may not either. It's not worldly difference but if your after the best possible image in digital you can capture well this is it. For a lot of people that's why they are buying it as it ends the argument , they know they have the best available and that's good enough. The issue is guys like me that know it can't afford it and looking for alternates to get me as close as possible. But I know what the other side looks like so sometimes that's frustrating. Most folks do not and than there good enough is the best there is. You know that argument too. Lol
It's there but you also have to want it. Buying a 5-10 percent increase in quality at high price tag is not a easy pill to swallow. In a sense it's kind of like buying a Leica lens at 5k but you Sony at 2400 is 97 percent as good as the Leica. Kind of those kinds of anaolgy. My Sony A7r II is a lovely sensor but this 50mpx is better plus I get longer exposures , pretty much the same ISO limits and slightly better DR and I'll have a nicely quality file. I know that going in but than the justification, features and use case comes in than you have to question your own sanity. Lol
p.27 #20 · Official: Hasselblad X1D-50c Medium Format Mirrorless
I can't speak for the Pentax glass but just some observing from members that know there stuff that own the glass , it does have sample variance and the glass is great but not rated that high in general. But I never shot it so take that with a grain of salt.
