Can't wait to see the billboard ads that will result from these images...

bsbeamer

I'll wait until Adobe or whoever figures out how to harness the power of those graphics processors to speed things up. Even on a decent CPU, I can imagine how ridiculously slow manipulating 50mp images would be.

GeekyNerdGuy

daaaaaaaaaaaaaaa [breath] aaaaaaaaaaang

discounteggroll

You would expect a sensor of such size could simply use current methods of high speed capture such as those methods used by much smaller cameras. The same could be said with ISO boost methods. I don't think anyone would complain if the max resolution was reduced to 25MP as long as you could get 10fps.

lilaliendog

Didn't the last one cost $25.000?

Nathan Drake

@Muttonchops: This camera is for in-studio work only where they have all the light they need and don't need or want high ISO settings.

You won't see anybody shooting football or their kids soccer games with one of these.

AndyMac

Up to ISO400?? Isn't that pretty pathetic? I mean with the light gathering capabilities of a double size chip it's not that big a deal I guess. Meh I don't know. Sounds pretty fantastic really.

Muttonchops

Wow. I'm drooling. No price yet, but I can tell you it's gonna cost at least 3 times the price of my car....

Even for pro photographers, the price is quite steep, unless you're into high end fashion shoots.

Perhaps someday some manufacturer can make affoardable medium format digital cameras...I can only dream.

nosauten

It's an absolutely gorgeous piece of industrial design, to begin with, and for those that demand this and have application for it, it's incomparable.

And it's a Hassie. That's the bottom line.

ps61318

So they are going to take a models picture with stunning 50mp detail and then shop the heck out of it until all the details are gone.

powerball

@AndyMac: We've actually done a fair bit of aerial photography out of helicopters with the Hasselblad H3D with great results. The detail is unattainable with any 35mm SLR, including the 1DsIII. Light isn't too much of an issue during daylight hours. For evening work, we've had to strap on a gyro to stabilize things since we can't push the ISO.... but it's worked very well.

misler

How is it on prono?

Gary_7vn

I'm gonna pick a couple of these up, you know, for my beat-around workhorse cameras I take with me on hiking trips.

Dook_In_The_Urinal

Yeah, but can it do super-slo-mo? I didn't think so. Can't make a phone call or play MP3s either. What a piece of crap.

Slartibartfast

The body for the Hasselblad H3DII-39, which has 39 Megapixel costs $34k, so for this one to be 50 megapixels, I'm gonna guess it'll be $40k.

I'm a journalist so I'd never need this for ANYTHING, but it would be fun to rent it some day to see what it produces in the studio.

Chester_Copperpot

We currently use the H3DII-39MS, which is the multi-shot variation of the 39 megapixel camera. Shooting at full res gives us a 220 megabyte raw file. After feeding it out and opening the file in photoshop the scratch disk begins to fill....
We have a dual 3ghz quad core macpro with 12gigs of RAM, raided system and scratch disks and these image files still slow my machine way down...especially after adding the tenth adjustment layer. However, the result is astonishing! We've been shooting images of trucks for a automotive company and can produce billboard size prints that are unbelievably resolute.
Still there are limitations. The multishot mode which gives us the huge file size and ultimate resolution can only be used on non-moving objects. The camera is very slow in comparison to our 35mm rigs and slightly larger and heavier. Most of the time we use a tripod and iso 50 for everything we shoot but the light gathering capabilities of 400 iso on this camera seem to compare to 800 iso on our 35mm rigs. Otherwise, shooting hand held, even in less than desirable circumstances, is a breeze. Just as long as you've got a huge CF card!

8086child

@lordargent: it goes to iso 50. the difference between iso 50 and iso 400 is quite noticeable but more in terms of noise than sharpness...at least on the H3DII-39MS.

8086child

Up to ISO 400?

I don't care how high the ISO goes, I want to know how low it goes.

The lower the ISO, the sharper the pictures (assuming you have enough light).

lordargent

@8086child:

I've used the H3DII-39 as well as the PhaseOne P45+ (mated to a Mamiya RZ67 and an H2); which uses the same Kodak CCD. I'd say that ISO400 is more like ISO1600 on a modern dSLR. Personally, we get more then amazing billboard sized results even with the old Leaf Aptus 22+H1, only in the most extreme circumstances do we even need the full 39MP. While I can think of some circumstances where we would need 50MP, I think this would only cater to an even smaller niche of this already niche market.

As far as the sDSLR side, cameras like the 1Ds and upcoming Sony 25MP dSLR are very limited in a pro environment when flash-sync speeds are still limited to 1/250th of second. So there will still be a need for the leaf-shutter + digital medium format. The 16-bit color depth advantage seems to have gotten smaller compared to newest iterations of dSLRs.

Scaramanga

@GeekyNerdGuy: not as slow as you might imagine. any good workstation should have no problem working with files that size.

i've used hasselblads with very high res digital backs on numerous photoshoots, and retouching/editing work in photoshop has never been an issue on any mac pro or high-end pc that i've used.

theorieofself

@Scaramanga: We debated long and hard about going for the P45 setup. We had been using an H1 with an Imacon 22MP back and as you say we have produced beautiful billboard prints for years. For us the selling point on the H series camera setups has been the multishot mode. We have yet to see any other digital rig compete with the detail we can get from the 4 passes on the H cameras, even those with larger sensors like the P45. And true, our is a very niche market, but our clients are demanding the detail we get out of this setup. Whether the printers of today can handle this kind of output is for another thread...

8086child

@discounteggroll: I hope that was a Malcolm in the Middle reference :)

fudged71