najobskalf
Member
There seems to be some concern that the film Hasselblad may disappear one day, replaced by a purely digital H version. This would be unfortunate for quite unsentimental reasons, one of which is the fact that digital backs are smaller than 6x6. It was recognized back in the 1970s that the area of the film (or other image-forming medium) limited the amount of information that the image could hold. Thus a smaller format had to have more highly corrected lenses just to try to compensate for this. Hence, in practice a Hasselblad has used for the highest quality, rather than a Leica. (This reasoning does not lead to large formats being preferred, as it becomes much more difficult to correct lens aberrations for these.) My point is that sticking a well-corrected Zeiss medium format lens in front of a small(ish) CCD is defeating much of the work that went into designing the lens in the first place - even if the CCD has 32 MPs. If we have to go digital, at least let us have backs with 6x6 CCDs. Canon has recognized the value of "full-frame" CCDs in its latest digital SLRs - let us hope that the current owners of the Hasselblad marque come to understand it too.
(I do not despise digital photography as such - I use a Nikon Coolpix 7600 for all my casual snapshots.)
(I do not despise digital photography as such - I use a Nikon Coolpix 7600 for all my casual snapshots.)