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My new 503CWD arrived today!

E

eugeniov

New Member
It must be one of the few still available!
I found it even more impressive than I thought. Still getting used to the digital back, but I'm already loving it.
I feel that it was more a romantic purchase than a rational one, but although the back is old in digital standards, it's a wonderful camera, and hopefully being something special it will hold some value in the future.
Any advice with the CFV? So far I've found Phocus kind of cumbersome, but I'm getting there.
Thanks to everyone here, I've been reading this forum for a while before taking the plunge!

e
 
Good for you!

Welcome at hasselbladinfo forum!


A wise and partly emotional decision to buy the 503CW with digital back.
From your first post I understand you got the CFV DB with your 503CW.
That is an excellent combination.
Several posters will be able to help you get started with the risk of stepping on toes Jürgen is one of them who knows what it is all about.

I am sure he will follow your first steps and help you to answer any questions that may arise.

Paul
 
Hi!

Congratulations getting a CFV back!

First I´d like to recommend using a different raw converter then Phocus. Phocus probably gives you the best files, but it´s so darn heavy to run, everything takes a lot of time.

I use the old flexcolor, and convert to DNG, use ACR, then I use bridge to scoop around. Works great!

What you should look at is a 4*4 hood magnifier, then you will get a "full frame view", it´s really nice combo with the CFV back.

The CFV back might be old in standards as to the display and so. But the image quality is still absolute top notch. I´ve tried it against d3x and d3, and I think a lot of H system users will tell you the same; the image quality is really amazing in the CFV.

You´ll get anourmous headroom in ACR, the color pop like nothing else, the graduations when shooting B/W is just raw.

If the CFV could shoot low noise images up to 1600, and had a 3 inch high resolution display, it would be in my bag forever (...)
 
Phocus demands more computer power than flexcolor that is a fact.
Given the right hardware Phocus is at least as fast to manage compared with flexcolor.
 
thanks

Thanks a lot for the advice, I'm sure I'll have to bother you all more than once with other stuff, but I hope not too much; I'm comfortable with the film hasselblad quirks, so this shouldn't be that much different.

I'm still waiting for the battery to be fully charged to play around, and so far could only shoot a little bit with the firewire cable as power source. but at first sight the files look beautiful, and as sometimes I've read before, they really look a lot film-like, which I'm really liking.

So far my first question is: the ISO setting wheel in the camera body... that's useless isn't it? also, I've read somewhere about ISO 800 with this back, is it just refered to underexposed & pushed files? I have the latest firmware installed in the camera and that ISO isn't available.

thanks in advance for your help.
 
503CW ISO setting

The ISO setting on the 503CW is to be used only for TTL flash.
You may wonder why the highest setting is 3200 ISO.

That value is used to give you the option to use the flash as fill in.
To use this you mislead the flash unit by setting the ISO value higher than the actual film or DB setting.
With 400 ISO film two stops less as fill in means a setting of 1600 ISO.
 
polypal said:
The ISO setting on the 503CW is to be used only for TTL flash.
You may wonder why the highest setting is 3200 ISO.

That value is used to give you the option to use the flash as fill in.
To use this you mislead the flash unit by setting the ISO value higher than the actual film or DB setting.
With 400 ISO film two stops less as fill in means a setting of 1600 ISO.
Click to expand...

nice tip, so basically you can control the flash output (compensation) with that wheel?
 
Eugeniov

Congratulations for your 503CWD .

You will have to be patient with that new gear . It takes some time , to get used to it , but I am shure , when you get more familiar with it , you will love it . You have to learn , how to use the camera and also how to use the CFV .
The same is valid for PHOCUS , which is very much like ADOBE LIGHTROOM and much easier and better to handle than FLEXCOLOR .
Please be aware , any files you processed with FLEXCOLOR can not be handeled by PHOCUS later .
I highly recommend to download the PHOCUS readme section as well as the PHOCUS USERS GUIDE from the HASSELBLAD home page .


Currently , the highest film setting for the CFV BACK is ISO 400 , even if you are on the highest firmware level . Mine is R245 and I believe there is no higher level for the CFV back yet .

Whenever you have questions , come back to this thread .
There is quite a number of CFV users in this forum , which will try to answer your questions .
You are welcome .

Jürgen
 
jotloob said:
Eugeniov

Congratulations for your 503CWD .

You will have to be patient with that new gear . It takes some time , to get used to it , but I am shure , when you get more familiar with it , you will love it . You have to learn , how to use the camera and also how to use the CFV .
The same is valid for PHOCUS , which is very much like ADOBE LIGHTROOM and much easier and better to handle than FLEXCOLOR .
Please be aware , any files you processed with FLEXCOLOR can not be handeled by PHOCUS later .
I highly recommend to download the PHOCUS readme section as well as the PHOCUS USERS GUIDE from the HASSELBLAD home page .


Currently , the highest film setting for the CFV BACK is ISO 400 , even if you are on the highest firmware level . Mine is R245 and I believe there is no higher level for the CFV back yet .

Whenever you have questions , come back to this thread .
There is quite a number of CFV users in this forum , which will try to answer your questions .
You are welcome .

Jürgen
Click to expand...

There is a firmware update for the Hasselblad gear that is supposed to give us iso800 on the non-H backs, but thusly it has not arrived.

You will find the quality of the colour noticably better from either Flexcolor or Phocus, over ACR. If you really don't want to use Flexcolor or Phocus, you can try Raw Developer which does a stellar job with fff and 3fr files. You can download a trial for free.

...and Phocus is REALLY, and I mean REALLY hardware intensive. It will barely run on my G5 with 6GB of RAM and an updated video card, and it will sort of run on my MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAm.

And Jurgen is correct about the non-compatiblity of files, but it's the other way - you can go from Flexcolor to Phocus, but not from Phocus to Flexcolor. The best way to not have any issues is to copy your files into 2 folders, one for one program, one for the other, until you decide which workflow is best for you.

Enjoy the camera - great images and a lot of fun to shoot with.
 
alastairbird said:
And Jurgen is correct about the non-compatiblity of files, but it's the other way - you can go from Flexcolor to Phocus, but not from Phocus to Flexcolor.
Click to expand...

Alastairbird

Yes of course , you are right . Sorry , I have mixed that up.
Files are upwards compatible but not downwards .
 
Hi,

congratulations to the 503 CWD. I'm working on it since 1 1/2 year. Except the monitor and buttons, which are quite old, the image quality is great. as you know, the 120/4 macro is an excellence lens. even i'm very pleased, i like to ask you and give you some tips. be careful with moire, the back is not easy to handle this. phocus unfortunatley is slow even on my mac pro 2.66 with 8 gb ram. much slower then lightroom, so my experience. but the quality is very good!

for some reason I have the problem, that my digital back has only on one site a magenta color. it's very lighty, but for professionell reproduction of drawings as example, you can see it, the paper is not homogen, it's green on one and magenta on the other side.

hasselblad told me, it can happen if the flash time ist to short. I never use faster then 1/60. but this shouldn't be the way. also as I had the back in service, they couldn't/didn't fix it.
I'm wondering, if you can report this problem as well. I would be interested for information about it. again, it's very lighty, for all other kind of photography you can't see it and image quality is superb.

regards
lorri
 
Congratulations!

Enjoy your 503CWD.

Be patient and go slow and you will be rewarded.

FYI, if you happen to have Apple Aperture on your machine, it will also process the Hasselbld RAW files.

However, Phocus is still the best of all the RAW processing tools for your camera ... with one caveat, it is somewhat slow for processing a lot of tiff files at once ... like wedding photography for example.

But you should still take the time to learn Phocus because at some time you should enjoy the benefit of shooting tethered to your computer ... which requires use of Flexcolor or Phocus.

Also know that the CFV back itself can be used on other camera's with the appropriate V adapter. I use mine on a Mamiya RZ Pro-II and a view camera for Tilt/Shift work. This can extend the utility of your investment in future.

Best of luck with your new "Baby."
 
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