Competition lives

And it helps improve the breed, as ever When I read the other day that Mamiya was quitting the photography business, having blown not a few Yen in developing its medium format digital camera, I confess my first reaction was unease. While Mamiya may have been guilty of poor market analysis – Canon’s 35mm format sensors being the equal of…

Exciting times for medium format digital

…have largely got the user interface right. Finally, there’s the Phase One 645 body (looking for all the world like the Mamiya DL28 but with a Phase One back rather than a Leaf), rumored to take all sorts of different lenses from Hasselblad and Pentax. These are exciting times. Probably costly, but this is all pointing in the right direction….

Quality is subjective

How does the Canon EOS 5D measure up? Mostly ramblings on ergonomics. A couple of columns back I mentioned how bulky the Canon EOS 5D felt, compared with that svelte street fighter, the Leica M. Why, even compared to a medium format Mamiya 6 rangefinder, it still feels bulky. This bulk is a mixture of the Large Amorphous Blob school…

Noise

…purely mechanical and wonderfully quiet. Feedback was not the greatest, not helped by the awkward location of the button, but it was a joy to use and hear. The other was in the Mamiya 6, also a medium format camera. This one is purely electronic, the shutter release is actually an electrical switch, with all the challenges that poses for…

Going Big

…Yes, you can get there with a Leica but everything has to be just about dead right for a perfect print that large. On occasion I can make a Big Print where you cannot tell whether 35mm or 6×6 was used, but not always. So when detail in the details matters the Mamiya 6 or Rollei 6003 comes out –…