Bigger sensors and cheaper cameras coming.

Right now if you want a step up in sensor size (and dynamic range, resolution, color fidelity, etc.) your choices have been limited to the established Hasselblad (made by Fuji) H3D range which tops out at 50 megapixels from a 48mm x 36mm Kodak sensor and costs more than most new cars. There’s a coming offering from Mamiya, the DL28 at $15,000 and Pentax is rumored to have filed patent papers for a medium format DSLR. The latter makes especial sense given that Pentax already has fine medium format lenses available for both 6x7cm and 6×4.5cm film formats.

Now rumors abound of a medium format offering from Nikon which may be 48x48mm or 48x36mm (like the Leica S2 at $40,000 and counting) and may be a DSLR or a rangefinder along the lines of the great Mamiya 6 and 7. I used a 6 for many years and just loved the compromise of negative size and reasonable bulk in a near-silent rangefinder body.

The significance of these rumors is that Nikon is more than likely to make a working proposition of a medium format digital than most. The Hasselblad relies on the traditional waist level format at a ridiculous price. I haven’t used one but reviews suggest the camera is clunky in the extreme with slow operating controls, a lousy LCD display and limited in-camera adjustments, not to mention seriously compromised metering. So the rumors about Nikon are especially appealing. If Nikon can confer its trade mark ease of use on a medium format body with a 50 megapixel low noise sensor at a price of, say, $10,000, I do believe the floodgates will open. Any number of pros and advanced amateurs will hold their breath at the price, much as they did when Canon started asking $7,000 for its pro full frame 1Ds bodies, but will nevertheless bite the bullet. With so relatively few pixels on such a large sensor the image quality should easily match 4 x 5 film cameras at a fraction of the weight and inconvenience, not to mention an increase of an order of magnitude in productivity. Have you ever tried scanning 4×5 film? I have. Not fun and not fast.

Whatever the rumors, this all spells good news for image quality mavens. More sensors by more manufacturers will mean lower prices and we can expect to see better ergonomics as manufacturers learn from smaller format DSLRs which 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.

This is getting ridiculous.

The soon-to-be-available Canon 5D/II consumes some 22 megabytes per image. Child’s play. How about 50 mb a pop?

The Hasselblad H3D50 medium format digital camera

So twenty snaps on this baby (made by Fuji, by the way, not by flaxen haired Swedish maidens) dictate one gigabyte of storage. Or, stated differently, your one terabyte hard drive where you store these will hold a mere 20,000 pictures.

And before you stock up on hard drives, what sort of processing power are you going to need to manipulate those huge images? Presumably a top-of-the-line MacPro with multiple CPUs. And, of course, a couple of 30″ Cinema Displays to do justice to the $30k you just blew on the camera. Add another $10k for computer hardware.

My, digital is expensive. Guess I’ll be sticking with the 12 mb images from my 5D/I a while longer. The body and seven lenses ran me under $9k, but really cost nothing in cash outlay as I sold all my Leica and Rollei gear to finance the Canon. Chump change, eh? I suppose I should add another $900 for the MacBook and $300 for more memory and disk storage, but I use that for lots of other things, too. At least my HP DJ90 wide carriage printer should work with the Hassy, no?

Most of the time!

It never ceases to amaze me how photographers will splash out on the latest megapixel wonder camera. Point-and-shoots now often boast over 10 megapixels and DSLRs are now up to 22+ mps in full frame sensors. Yet where do all those pictures end up? Why, on a computer screen of course, likely 20″ diagonal in size or less.

Scroll down a while and take a look at the many articles here where I include snaps to illustrate some hardware issue. Chances are that the picture was made with my ancient (5 years old) Olympus 5050Z – a 5 megapixel camera which I use at its lowest quality setting, generating 640 x 480 pixel images – 0.3 megapixels. That’s nice as I can upload them to this journal without any further compression. It probably sells used for well under $100.

Before they got caught up in the pixel race, Nikon’s professional DSLRs offered a relatively low pixel count, preferring to focus on sturdiness and speed of operation. The 3 or 4 mp originals were more than good enough for newspaper work, most of the time, and even then the quality of the original could not possibly be reflected in newsprint reproduction.

So my take on all of this is that the only photographers needing more than 640 x 480 are those making large prints (like me!) and pros working for large format glossy magazines where the difference matters (half a dozen other guys).

Of course, if you were to show up at a modeling session with Linda Evangelista, say, with my little Oly, I do suspect that you might be unceremoniously shown the door, but that’s not to say your pictures would have been any worse than the pro’s had you actually been allowed to take them

A medium format DSLR.

With all the money wasted in making the underwhelming Leica M8, a dated and obsolete 35mm format SLR and the silly rebadging of Panasonic point-and-shoots, you would think it was all over at Leica. With its modest resources the company is foolishly trying to compete against the vast capital of Canon, Sony, Nikon, Pentax, etc. all of whom make cameras far superior to anything from Leica at a fraction of the price.

Well, finally, Leica has taken a leaf out of Apple’s book and is Thinking Different.

The Leica S2. A 30 x 45mm 38 megapixel sensor and a new range of lenses.

Clearly a premium product which should appeal to many professionals, this camera would seem to compete directly with the Hasselblad H range of digital cameras and, I would guess, would be priced similarly, meaning $30,000+ for the body alone. The DSLR format (much like the Pentax 6×7 in concept, but digital) makes for a far easier to use camera than the more tripod oriented Hasselblads and the lens range promised is impressive.

The sensor is made by Fujitsu, and unknown quantity, so it will be interesting to see how it performs. Much of the design work seems to have been done by Phase One, an established presence in larger format digital cameras. That’s encouraging.

Of special note is the fact that all the lenses will have leaf shutters which are ideal for flash sync, as they will properly expose the whole frame with flash at any shutter speed. Of course, the inclusion of a shutter in each lens makes the lenses costlier and Leica lenses are already very expensive, thanks to an overpaid, lazy, unionized German workforce. In fairness to Leica, the many Leica lenses I have used over the years have, without exception (OK, the 1930s 50mm f/2 Summar was a real dog above f/4) been superior to just about anything out there. The Apo-Macro Summarit f/2.5 120mm (equivalent to 85mm on a full frame camera) looks especially mouthwatering. And, joy of joys, Leica has finally discovered autofocus, some 20 years after Japanese SLR makers added this great technology to their interchangeable lenses. I would guess the lenses will retail well north of $5,000 each though who knows what the dollar price will be once the kindergarten known as the US Congress gets through with destroying our currency.

Promised for the summer of 2009, if the company survives that long, you can read more at Leica’s poorly designed, lugubrious web site – if you have the patience to get through all the mindless and time wasting flash videos.

If the camera ever gets into volume manufacture, it could fairty be said that this is truly the first innovative camera design from Leica since the M3, which I used for some 30 years. That game changer first sold in 1954 ….

From LowePro.

When I sold my Rollei medium format film gear the LowePro bag in which it was stored was sold also. Way too large for anything I would contemplate in terms of equipment given the Canon 5D’s more compact size.

I finally got around to deciding on a new bag for the 5D gear and settled on the LowePro Mini-Trekker AW. LowePro has such a huge selection of products that it’s not easy finding what suits your needs best and though they have a selection aide on their site it’s not as good as it could be.

I narrowed it down knowing that I wanted a comfortable backpack design for trekking through the woods and aware that a handful of lenses, a ring flash, a few spare CF cards, batteries and the 5D’s instruction book (yes, I still get lost in all those menus and buttons sometimes) would be my companions on such trips.

Loaded for bear

In the above configuration, reading clockwise from the top left: 85mm/1.8, 15mm fisheye, 24-105mm L, 5D/200 L, 100mm macro, 50/1.4, 20mm, ringflash. I use UV filters on all lenses (except the fisheye whose bulbous front element precludes the use of a filter) so have need of only one lens cap – for the fishy. Alternatively, I can exclude any one lens and mount the 400mm f/5.6 L on the camera instead. It fits nicely with the lens hood collapsed. A neat attached fold-out plastic cover makes the whole thing weather resistant and quality is top notch – a notable feature of LowePro bags. It comes in green or black (ugh!), does not scream ‘Steal Me’ and has external straps and a supporting pocket for a tripod. (I prefer a shoulder bag for the tripod to spread the load and use a Tamrac for my 30 year old Linhof tripod). Add the QD sternum and waist straps, included, and you have something clearly thought through at the design stage by a working photographer. As I want for nothing gear wise, this bag should have a long and useful life ahead of it.

LowePro’s site asks for $182 for one of these which is ridiculous. I bought mine on ePrey for $120 delivered, new with all OEM instructions, labels, what-have-you.

By the way, here’s my old one with the Rollei 6003 kit:

A throwback to the bad old days of film

The scale is different, but the old bag was some 50% larger than the Mini-Trekker.

As usual, I find that all those zippers need some breaking in but once you get over that the bag is as user friendly as these things can ever be.