SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
A couple years ago, Hasselblad released a 200-megapixel, Multi-Shot version of its H5D medium format camera. Now it's back with a bonkers, 400-megapixel version of the H6D: the H6D-400c.
Hasselblad's Multi-Shot technology is pretty straightforward: it takes four 100-megapixel images, shifting the sensor by one pixel for each capture, and then two more shots that shift the sensor by half a pixel. By combining all six stills, the resulting file is a single 400-megapixel (23200 x 17400 pixel) 16-bit TIFF file that weighs in at 2.4GB. In fact, the images are large enough that the camera needs to be tethered to a computer to capture them.
[...] The camera will go for $47,995 when it launches in March, compared to the H6D-100c's relatively modest $27,000 price tag.
Story at The Verge.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Kromagv0 on Thursday January 18 2018, @02:34PM (3 children)
What are they expecting people to use this kind of camera for.
More than likely exactly what they used film cameras like this for: landsacpes, photos for high end glossy magazines, product photos for billboards, photographers with more money than brains, things that might get tightly cropped, really nice portraits (the depth of filed in medium formats is really good for this), anything that could benefit from a really high dynamic range and color depth, astrophotography, things that you want to have a poster printed of, etc. It is only in the last 2 generations of high end full frame DSLRs that have been able to match 35mm film, and this upcomming generation of digital medium format will likely be the one that medium format digitals are capable of what film is. Large format is still its own monster and there it is mostly people making their own large format digital cameras out of flat bed scanners. These like their film/glass plate brethren are used almost exclusively for landscapes or artistic photography.
Going back to the old Hasselblad 500C/M which had a negative that was about 56mm x 56mm and with the great lenses available for them and one could capture lot of detail that most people never realized could be had. I am more familiar with the limits of 35mm film but effective resolution does scale with negative size, so 35mm camera with its 24mm x 36mm negative using good film and a great lens (one that is sharp at about f/4) is capable of capturing about 40-45 megapixels with a 10 to maybe 11 stop dynamic range. So scaling that up to a size similar to the Hasselblad 500C/M you would be looking at an image in the 160-202 megapixel range. The sensor size on this camera looks to be 53.4mm × 40.0mm [hasselblad.com] with 16bpc color output providing 15 stops of dynamic range. Given that it looks like this camera should be able to make use some of those really nice modern f/.7 lenses that start getting pretty sharp at f/1.4 but have a very shallow depth of field. Using a slower lens will yield a lower effective resolution because of being diffraction limited [cambridgeincolour.com]. Even if one lacks a lens like that these images likely won't be used at the full 600 megapixels but will be down scaled to more manageable sizes which will increase sharpness as well as decrease the noise so images people see would likely be around 144 megapixels or even 36 megapixels. Having the higher resolution to start out with, as well as the higher bit depth, dramatically improves the end results after doing post processing. Also for the professional side of cameras the megapixel war has basically ended as professionals understand that image quality is more than just the number of dots you can claim as film is really still the benchmark since good black and white film is capable of resolving more detail than the lenses on the camera it is in can resolve. Things like noise, high ISO performance, and dynamic range are much more important for choosing a camera chassis. Also picking the correct lens for what you are shooting is as important or more important than the chassis behind it. I still use very good but old "vintage" lenses as they are almost all primes and were almost all professional lenses on my film and digital cameras.
It will be interesting to see how this new Hasselblad stacks up against the rumored to be announced soon new Pentax medium format to replace the 645Z. Especially since Pentax has had better results with the using the sensor shift technology in their current flagship full frame digital and now new lower tier cameras than Hasselblad did in their previous 200 megapixel camera. The current Pentax medium format does not have sensor shift and is likely approaching the end of its production life but produced better image quality than most of the the Hasselblads did over its production life even if it only produced 51 megapixel images.
If one wants to see what types of images these types of cameras are capable of and how one creates such images there is this write up from a couple months back by someone who used a 645Z to create [pentaxforums.com]this image [pentaxforums.com].
T-Shirts and bumper stickers [zazzle.com] to offend someone
(Score: 2) by Kromagv0 on Thursday January 18 2018, @03:23PM
Apparently I misread things and mixed up the actual 6 shot 400 megapixel as being 4 shot 600 megapixel.
T-Shirts and bumper stickers [zazzle.com] to offend someone
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday January 18 2018, @04:54PM (1 child)
All that advanced optical and electronic tech ... Yet, this is 2018, so they will somehow mostly be used to take selfies.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Kromagv0 on Thursday January 18 2018, @05:39PM
At almost $50,000 I doubt that it will be mostly, but then there is that more money than brains category I mentioned so for that group it probably is mostly.
I have been asked when out taking photographs why I have such an old lens on a new camera by many people. I do use old lenses some of which are about 50 years old with most being closer to 40 so they old and look the part. The reasons I keep using them is resolving ability on most prime (non-zoom) lenses hasn't really improved (ultra wide angles are the exception), I still use an old film camera as well, I understand how these old lenses work, how to use them correctly, and finally I don't want to spend close to $10,000 on comparable modern professional lenses. Just this past weekend I got asked several times why when I was photographing some flowers at the Como Conservatory as a high end digital with an old Vivitar Series 1 135mm lens sitting on a stack of old extension tubes with a circular polarizer on the end is an odd sight.
Gear matters up to a point and far too many people chase gear without understanding why. Most of the time it is because they think they will take better pictures but so many of the problems with people's pictures is not what they were taken with, but in how they were taken. If one understands how to take photos and then understands their gear it becomes possible to work around the limitations of ones gear, especially with digital images.
T-Shirts and bumper stickers [zazzle.com] to offend someone