Hasselblad X1D-50c First Impressions Review

OP is confused (as I was initially) that the Buy widget from Amazon has a Hasselblad, just not THIS Hasselblad.

I think you dpr guys are dealing with your own prejudices. I don't see anyone in this forum talking about any magic related to MF, not regularly. By the opposite, I see tons of people regularly talking about the magic of FF, or the magic of certain brands. People like Ming Thein, f. i., lately coverted to MF, just takes pictures, doesn't talk about any magic. And many do like him. MF is expensive and more critical in general, and yes, you do get better results if you need extreme resolution, big prints and tonal gradation. If you need them, what means pro work.. But in order to be a good photographer you don't need MF. Not even FF. Or APSC. You can shine with a phone camera or a film P&S. But that's another story.

Richard, my point (here and in some other comments) is not that this or the GFX is so much better than the A7RII ... is that you have a problem in looking at the subject in a one way only.

First point: yes, you are correct ... that art 85/1.4 put on A7R2 (shot wide open), gives the best light gathering. It's someting like 1.5stops better than the XCD 120/3.5. This difference will most likely be more important than the sensor performance difference, which as you already showed is less than a stop.

Second point: In real life you shoot stuff and want to show it. You shoot fashion, landscape ... at anything but wide open, so the "slow lenses" of the GFX or X1D are not a real problem. You might not get the resolution advantage you would expect, but the speed of the lenses is not the problem, and MF never had too fast lenses. The problem is that MF should use better sensors :)

We checked this because it's where a larger sensor should have an advantage and, in this case, it does. However, the advantage is relatively small, given it costs over twice the price of a D810.

We wouldn't have given it a Gold award without that difference.

DPHI: It would be tempting getting a 5DSR with those lenses just for landscape. No zooms for that resolution.

i cannot agree more. hopefully whatever they've learned in developing this would be used to create the digital XPan.

Want a digital X-Pan? Get a Sony A7II and use sweep panorama, or 16:9 shooting mode. Crop the vertical by 11 percent and you've got a 2:1 panorama, just like the Noble X-Pan! Not big enough? Double the size with bicubic sampling in Photoshop! These days it works extremely well! There's a large assortment of Zeiss lenses native to Sony E-Mount, which are not too shabby. You can also shoot a sequence of verticals and join them in post for enormous, sumptuous panoramas that will print beautifully!

If a credit card is tickling your fanny, go for the Hasselblad! But remember it is always good technique and thoughtful content that win the day.

Well, that's not entirely correct. The X1D is very affordable compared to most other medium format cameras. Only GFX and 645z are cheaper, and those don't offer leaf shutter lenses. I myself am considering purchasing it, but will wait and see what Nikon D810 successor will come up with. The 50MP CMOS in the X1D is already three years old, after all.

Well good point not sure to be honest. Maybe it depends how those lenses perform as compared to the FF cameras.

Again, the same can be said for FF lenses as resolution of the sensor increases. I'm not criticizing your personal decisions by any means, but I have, like with so many things, stopped with waiting for the next best thing, whether it be a FF, MF, audio, car, etc. If something's current capabilities serves my purposes now I will usually go for it, assuming I can afford what I am going for. I guess as one gets older the waiting for the next best thing takes on a different perspective and why I was very interested in the X1D but chose to go for the GFX and am really enjoying it (so far).

I get to all is good :) I do shoot Hasselblad in fact shot some portraits with it yesterday. Right along side my PEN F. :) Of course my Hasselblad is a 503 cxi and shoots film. :)

I for one wasn't hating on it earlier, there is lots I love about it, including what the test chart is showing, and the metadata approach to high ISO shooting.

But this preview has actually curtailed any thoughts I was harbouring about jumping on board with it.

I love the design and how they made it so compact. It's a camera I thought I really could take with me without too much hassle, except...

10 seconds to boot up, it eats through the battery and is awkward to change the AF point. That's just not going to work for a walk around camera that will frequently be turned on and off as opportunities arise.

I also think 50MP is a bit on the low side for a camera of this cost, given the Full Frame bodies available now.

I don't need high MP for every shot, but I prefer to crop rather than change lens, so more MP turns my primes into zooms: 28, 35, and 50mm from one lens. A crop is a crop

I'll wait for MK 2; 80MP, 2s startup, touch AF point selection and in-camera charging?

My bet still stays. Who wants to challenge it?
Half the secret in good digital imagemaking is keep the sensor and camera quite cool. Cooler it is, better images it makes.

Zilver, you may be right and I may be well wrong. I was still thinking when the MF digital market few years ago was about few thousands units per year across all brands. So I may be well wrong.
Yet to believe what a UK dealer brags about pre order i would look at it with a big grain of salt. 30K units for UK only is a huge number, it would be huge even world wide.
Economy has improved a lot the last few years, and a lot of Leica stores are blooming around the world. They are in good locations, pay good looking sales people wearing expensive suites like in a Tag or Rolex store, that means there are buyers for these expensive cameras for sure.
Yet 30k pre order in just one country which normally carries higher price tags for cameras, I want to see it first.

I have not tripped over semantics.

1. There is no fundamental advantage of letting the camera undexpose under the hood vs you doing it manually.

2. Many "traditional" cameras take the same approach.

You cannot have your *effective* ISO cake and eat your *effective* dynamic range too. DPReview's comment does not make sense as is.

Fully agree with you Class A.

Furthermore, I don't see the point of why this cam would even allow you to set ISO over 1600. It doesn't produce JPEG, so you have to do RAW conversion in any case and adjusting exposure is an (almost) necessary step in that workflow already.

So if ISO over 1600 is actually reflected in the recorded RAW file, the camera efectively (or, as bclaff said: "nicely") cuts the dynamic range off - doesn't matter if it did that by pushing the sensor or by postproc pushing the RAW.

OTOH, if ISO over 1600 is NOT reflected in the RAW, then such setting actually does nothing at all. Unless I'm missing something crucial here.

(Is the RAW file's bit-depth perhaps much larger than the bit-depth of sensor reading values? Then RAW files indeed wouldn't lose the DR info, but would ALWAYS be way larger than necessary - which would contribute nothing to the image quality - just alleviate a single click-and-slide at postproc workflow. Much larger files for THAT? Silly.)

Richard, thank you very much for your response.

However, you have just restated the advantages of "ISO invariance" or an "ISO-less" sensor. I am well aware of these advantages.

The problem with the way you want to have your cake and eat it too is rooted in the notion of effective ISO. Only if you are able to push the image in post-production by 4 EV without blowing out highlights, you actually get an effective ISO of 1600. If you can only push by 2 EV, your effective ISO is only ISO 400.

We apparently agree that one good way of measuring ISO is to look at the "saturation-based speed", i.e., obtain the ISO value by looking at the maximum possible exposure that does not lead to a clipped output. If you stop short of pushing by 4EV in post -- whether that is through only pushing by 2EV in the first place or pulling down from a nominal 4EV push -- you don't get to ISO 1600.

Do you not agree?

My point was that the X1D-50c does not bring anything new to the table w.rt. ISO invariance. There are many other ISO-invariant cameras from Sony, Pentax, and Nikon.

Many Pentax DSLRs do not apply hardware amplification beyond ISO 1600. I am unsure whether they actually protect the RAW data and only put a "push in post-processing" value in the metadata or ruin the RAW data, but in practice the difference does not matter much.

One simply shoots at base ISO (or a higher ISO setting that does not blow out the highlights) and then pushes in post as needed.

The only advantage of a camera supporting the capture of the unpushed RAW data and managing the required post-push through metadata is that the preview on the back of the camera won't look (potentially severely) underexposed. While that is a practical advantage, the main advantage is the ISO invariance of the sensor.

BTW, the Pentax 645Z could be ISO-invariant as it uses a Sony sensor and Sony sensors typically are "ISO-less".

P.S.: There are claims from apparently credible sources that the Hasseblad X1D-50c, the Fuji GFX, the Pentax 645Z, and even a PhaseOne, all use the same Sony 50MP 43.8 x 32.9mm CMOS sensor.

While the CFA and microlenses may be different among the above cameras, the ISO / dynamic range behaviour will be the same amongst all these cameras. If anything (the difference would have to be confirmed) the only difference would be whether some of these cameras would require the photographer to explicitly underexpose, or whether underexposure happens under the hood. The quality of the image will be the same in each case.

OK, I think I understand where you're coming from. I'll try to take this step by step.

First off, let's put ISO_Sat to one side. It's a sensible way of assessing sensors on a common basis but it's got a tenuous connection to what manufacturers (and most photographers) mean by 'ISO.' As you've spotted, ISO_Sat ignores what's going on here.

ISO Invariance is a property of the sensor (the degree to which there's any difference between using a high amplification setting vs using a low amplification setting and pushing later). What the Hasselblad and Fujifilm bring to the table is that they make use of this behavior (the Pentax doesn't so, even if it's broadly the 'same' sensor, it won't always give the same results).

We're agreed that 'all' this is doing is making it easier to take advantage of the sensor's ISO Invariant behaviour, but I'd say making such a workflow easier is significant.

There are two ways in which the manufacturer utilising the sensor's ISO Invariant behaviour is beneficial.

Firstly, it means that your preview comes out at the correct brightness (albeit without any indication of the additional highlights captured). This is no trivial matter: having some idea of what your final image might look like is a key tool and is much more useful than getting a severely underexposed p/review image that just shows the highlights.

Secondly, it means that you don't start your processing by having to push all the sliders in your converter to extremes (which risks limiting your scope to correct the image, since most Raw converters aren't designed with this way of shooting in mind. This is only a minor benefit, since most Raw converters also don't have tools for incorporating multiple EVs of extra highlights, either.

Consequently, when cameras stop analogue amplification, it makes a huge difference how the higher settings are dealt with. If you take the sensor data and mathematically 'amplify' it before writing it into the Raw file, all additional data is pushed to clipping, just as it would be by hardware amplification. If it's simply a metadata tag, telling the Raw converter how to initially render the data, then the additional data is preserved and the rendering intent can be corrected.

To be clear, though, this isn't a huge deal. It's nice to see a manufacturer use their sensor in an intelligent way, since it has a small but recognisable photographic benefit, but it's the cherry on the cake, rather than a fundamental advantage (in my personal opinion).

As much as anything else, we explained it so that people don't reach the wrong conclusion that having a larger sensor gives you lots of highlight recovery.

Richard, this will hopefully be my last response.

You went from
1. "increase ISO but not lose dynamic range" (in the article; still extremely misleading), to
2. "significantly easier workflow", to
3. "not a huge deal".

Fuji and Hasseblad are not using the sensor "more intelligently", they (may) provide a pretty small convenience factor. I inserted "(may)" because I am not sure whether the Pentax 645Z actually does not use a metatag system for higher ISO values as well. Are you positively sure it doesn't?

All a photographer needs to do is to ensure that highlights are not clipped. As a matter of fact, using the "metatag"-system makes this harder, because the highlights will appear to be clipped on the back LCD (and the histogram!) whereas they are not. [If the highlights are not clipping when pushed mathematically, you don't need an increased dynamic range anyhow).

Arguable, a straightforward scheme makes it easier to push ISO just enough, but no further.

A preview-boost with an actual RAW-data-histogram would be ideal, but no one is offering that yet, right?

In any event, if camera-supported underexposure is so useful (as opposed to letting the photographer handle it), why is that not offered for lower ISO values as well? Would it not be useful to, -- quote "not lose dynamic range" -- unquote, for lower ISO values to?

The answer is of course that your presentation of "increasing ISO while not losing dynamic range" is extremely misleading. If that worked, it would not only be a "small deal" or "easing the workflow", it would be revolutionary. It won't ever happen, though, as it is against the laws of physics.

I am not saying that an entirely ISO-invariant concept -- where the ISO setting just influences a metatag -- is not a good idea, but it isn't fundamentally different from what you can do today already.

Its like 9k

@Triplet - as this preliminary review above, of the H'blad X1D-50C, states, the design uses a milled metal billet to enclose the guts of the camera body to dissipate the heat - are you saying this will not work ?

Also, please explain how the Sony RX1R ii with it's 42mp FF sensor ( the pop-up viewfinder uses up even more internal volume ) and tiny body does not suffer any overheating issues nor loss of IQ ? In fact, the H'blad X1D follows the RX1 design by using a leaf shutter that drastically reduces the front/back dimension.

Blackmagic has already reduced the Alexa's price to consumer level....

So what's your point?????

:-)

Marcio....

I agree.....

The more units sold the lower the price can be which could be beneficial to pros. Given the discription of this camera the "slow photography" aspect is enough to keep most people who aren't serious about photography away don't you think?

Very interesting. I appreciate your point of view. As someone who has loved photography all his life, is 60+ y.o., has had to learn a little here and there, and found that cameras like the film Hasselblad cameras, 500c/m, made me learn and grow. If I could I'd study with high end pros and learn how to put cameras like the phase one xf 100mp to good use. I am fascinated. As it is I'll keep my eyes open, continue reading and practicing photography, and hopefully some day be fortunate enough to work with medium format which I've wanted to do for a long time. From the work I've seen there is a different level of image quality when done well and I want my image quality to get better and better.
In the meantime I've worked up to a D810 and put it to good use, although I have much to learn. We work well together the 810 and I.

But back to my previous point: The more the price comes down, the more chance I have of working with MF and raising my skills to the next level.

Leandros S:

I'm not simply seeing noise.

There's a least one Nikon APSC DSLR that allows shooting in both 14bit and 12 bit raw.

Also the Pentax KS2 shoots 12 bit raws only, though I can't find another Pentax DSLR that uses that sensor.

@OlyPent

About that bit-like Joke/Rant thingy: Hasselblad MF digital Backs & Cameras nowadays using 16-bit for years, but i've read the fact that Hasselblad made it clear to only use 15-bit of it.

And even 14 bit vs 14 bit isn't the same, one can't compare a camera with another, based just onto this fact, because the processing pipeline (not only the sensor) is being important.

For instance, my old, trusty 5D just records 12 bit RAW files (.CR2) but i can't complain about it's Tonality.

Higher bit depths will record mostly noise - but that's what you want: to digitize down to the analog noise floor and not be limited by LSB dither/sampling quantization.

Funny :)

I would like to see a source backing that claim before believing it.

Comparative images I've seen suggest that the Pentax has the smallest mount diameter of the three.

"The lens mount was designed for the as-released sensor size" Source?

Pythagoras.