Ken Compares D3 vs Hasselblad H3D-22 (22MP)
About 12 years ago, I bought a Hassy 500cm + 80mm kit lens for $1700 used at the local shop (eBay didn’t exist yet, I don’t think).
I thought this was an immense amount of money. It was damned near more than 2 week’s paycheck for me at the time.
But as expensive things tend to do, you love it all the more. I took shot after shot and was amazed at the image quality.
A couple years later, I bought an F5 for an even more staggering $1,999. Now we’re all looking at the (makes me light-headed) $5k D3 bodies.
Sure, if you’re a pro, probably not a huge deal, but when you’re making next to nothing on cameras, it’s a much bigger deal.
But you have to be an a completely different class to think that $20+ or $40k+ for a medium-format digital Hassy (IT’S NOT EVEN A SQUARE FORMAT ANY MORE!) is something that you can make pay for itself.
So for guys more like me who wonder what they’re missing out on (since I can’t afford / don’t want to pay for a digital back for my 500cm) can wander over to Ken’s site where he does a quick and unscientific comparison of the different bodies on the same subject.
To my eye, every shot he took with the D3 was overexposed, but the Hasselblad definitely has more detail and much more subtlety to the color shades than the D3.
But the Hassy doesn’t make me weep with joy the way the 20 year old 500cm did when compared to the crappy, crappy Sigma lenses that I was using on my Minolta at the time.
The D3 just doesn’t appear to lose that badly, imo, on this very small unscientific quickee test.
January 4th, 2008 at 16:03
About the MF digital backs. If you are in a studio or a fashon shoother that has routinely shot $10,000 a month in film, getting a Hasselblad digital is not that bad of an idea. So you spend $50K for the rig and it’s paid for itself in 5 months. Then after that it’s all profit since you roll that old film cost into your estimates and rates. That’s about the only senario this would work for though.