DPReview TV: Hands-on with the Hasselblad XCD 30mm F3.5

Perhaps a better link is this: https://www.photographyblog.com/news/photokina_2016_interview_hasselblad

But the Sony does not take a better photo, even in that limited test scene.

If you compare the portions of the images of people, the Hasselblad skin tones are far superior. The Sony skin tones are pretty bad. This is one of Sony's weaknesses: skin tones. In fact as a general rule the Sony colors do not match up well with the Hassy.

The Hassy is also sharper and shows more details.

So I would give the win easily to the Hasselblad in this case. That doesn't make the Sony a bad camera, and it's definitely a more versatile one. But in pure IQ, the Hasselblad wins out.

Reilly - I don't think you understand!

People buying Hasselblad or Leica are just NOT interested in what Sony does. You are just not going to drive a Honda if you can afford a Bentley and love driving it.

Even if that Honda is overpowered these people will just NOT care!

These are the same people that buy themselves a Rolex anytime over an Apple watch for that matter.

I don't know by which mental gymnastics one would arrive at a conclusion that the 50 MP Hasselblad has more detail than the Sony 60MP sample, but it most definitely does not, and it is no kind of close call:

https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/image-comparison?attr18=daylight&attr13_0=hasselblad_x1d50c&attr13_1=sony_a7riv&attr13_2=apple_iphonex&attr13_3=apple_iphonex&attr15_0=raw&attr15_1=raw&attr15_2=jpeg&attr15_3=jpeg&attr16_0=100&attr16_1=100&attr16_2=32&attr16_3=32&attr126_1=1&normalization=full&widget=1&x=0.2950480192076828&y=0.11141404547740091

Color rendition is 100 percent personal, but if you can't get great color out of a 70MP full frame raw, that's simply down to operator error.

They so review the SL3, D3500, etc. Buy it or not most people will click on a cool camera video.

Huh? The DPRTV videos hardly represent the scope of their total coverage, and if anything Chris & Jordan are usually quicker to post a video of mid-range cameras than the rest of the staff is to publish the full review...

In short, you're way off. On brand for the average DPR comment tho, wouldn't be DPR without curmudgeons and incessant belly aching.

It's mostly a matter of extremely small volumes. A lot of FF lenses are more complex, and some even have similar sized image circles, but they have a vastly larger addressable market to amortize costs over.

...so, yes? Because the marginal returns of MF are so small that it's hard to see it gaining a huge market share as time goes on. The history of photography has ever and ever been towards smaller formats, not the opposite...

The larger sensor will cost more, and the larger glass elements in the lenses will cost more. Production runs will not be as large and so that keeps costs higher as well.

But Fuji is trying to change the cost equation a bit; their MF cameras and lenses are less expensive to equivalent offerings from Hasselblad. And they are great cameras and lenses.

Pentax did a lot to change the cost equation a decade ago with the 645D and 645Z, but it didn't have much impact on the market overall.

The trouble, of course, with the Pentax system is that the bigger your sensor, the more problematic the mirror box is because it grows in size cubically. Which is why 44x33 mirrorless seems so impressively small in comparison.

Ironically, MF is probably the first system that should have gone mirrorless, considering the minimal user market requirements for good autofocus, burst rate, and read-out speed.

@biggercountry - I'm not sure that Canon's choice to address the concept on a special variant of a $3,000 short telephoto lens made only for a system that represents about 1% of the total ILC market reinforces your argument that more than 1 in 250 photographers are super concerned with bokeh...

This thread should qualify for statistical malpractice. Neither the stat about Google searches or the size of the market for that Canon lens is in any way a meaningful indicator of the interest in bokeh.

The bottom line is that we don't know; no one polls or takes data on this. But bokeh has been a tool of photographers for a very long time and does have its uses.

But...and again, it's not statistical proof, but it is interesting to note: Apple and Google and Samsung and other smartphone companies, which make the cameras that the vast majority of people use, definitely see bokeh as a feature that many are interested in. Hence they invest a lot of money in developing ways to replicate bokeh in their cameras and market it.

Also, when it comes to stand alone cameras and lenses, one doesn't need a large market to justify the product. Hasselblad only needs a very tiny percent of the market to succeed.

@ Androole - as noted above, that ratio is conjectured and otherwise irrelevant. The fact that a major manufacturer would consider "quality of bokeh" a design priority for any of their products IS relevant.

Sure, only a minority of photographers care about quality of bokeh. But that is changing. I believe that simulated/computational bokeh in smart phones is what has been driving the conversation, and I very much doubt that feature would even exist if there wasn't significant interest in the "effect" of shallow depth-of-field. And that is in the vast consumer market.

And when consumers convert to amateur and prosumer photographers, they probably bring that interest with them. I have little doubt that is the reason why DPR addresses it in their reviews.