Alex Koloskov
New member
Hope this comparison I did about a week ago will be interesting for the community:
I had a great opportunity to test-drive a new Hasselbald H4d camera with its huge 50 Megapixel digital back, thank to John Williams from Hotwire-digital.com. Knowing specification of the Hasselblad, I did not want to simply compare those 2 cameras: they are very different animals, with different purpose… besides the fact they both capture images
Ease of use, camera controls, weight, focus speed and other “external” parameters is not interesting for me, as all of this parameters is highly subjective, both cameras has a big list of fans among professional photographers.
What I was curious to see is an actual difference in the image quality, especially in macro and around macro world: this is most important for me as a product photographer.
Hasselblad had 120mm F4 HC macro lens, Canon was wearing 100mm F2.8L IS macro.
test setup:
Two very different object were photographed: one high contrast, high reflective jewelry piece and a live flower, it’s full of pollen stamen in particular. Exactly the same lighting and shooting distance were used for both cameras.
First, we shoot a sequence of different apertures to see how DOF is changed, but most important, how diffraction started to become an issue. This is very interesting to me, as many times I have go with as deep as possible DOF while working with various products, and knowing how much sharpness and details I will lose when closing aperture down is quite important to know.
Obviously, this was more like a lens test, as lens plays the main role in fighting (or helping) with a diffraction, but this is what I need as well: both cameras had best mainstream macro lens on them, and moist likely I would use the same HC 120mm lens on Hasselblad when (if) I decide to switch over to a Hasselblad system.
BTW, the super shallow DOF because of a larger physical sensor size, which always refers as an advantage of the medium format systems over 35mm ones, is not an advantage for me: Working about 5 years as a product photographer, I’ve never needed a super-shallow DOF. Instead, in most cases I need as super-deep DOF, and quite often I do a focus-stacking to get that desired deepness.
Second test was done by shooting both overexposed and underexposed images of that jewelry: high contrast, deep dark areas and bright silver makes already complicated shoot even more harder job for a camera to capture when under/overexposed.
For Hasselblad I was using Phocus 2.5.2 software to convert, adjust and generate lossless TIFF files, which was cut in Photoshop for this article. I found that Phocus works better in recovering dark or bright areas then Photoshop.
For Canon, all image manipulations were done in Photoshop CS5 and it’s RAW converter. No other editing were applied: sharpness was set to “high” for Hasselblad, default sharpening for Canon files in Adobe RAW converter. This settings seem to match Hasselblad’s “high” by the amount of sharpening. White balance was set to match flash color: K5700. No other white balancing was done: I want to use a default color from a camera RAW to see the color difference as well. But definitely, this test was not about the color reproduction.
Test results, conclusion and the video from even is on the blog post:
http://www.akelstudio.com/blog/hass...non-1ds-markiii-what-do-we-get-for-the-money/
The video : http://vimeo.com/15308467
I can't really re-post the whole thing here as it will loose the mouse-over functionality, which works great for 'recovery" images.
Enjoy
I had a great opportunity to test-drive a new Hasselbald H4d camera with its huge 50 Megapixel digital back, thank to John Williams from Hotwire-digital.com. Knowing specification of the Hasselblad, I did not want to simply compare those 2 cameras: they are very different animals, with different purpose… besides the fact they both capture images
Ease of use, camera controls, weight, focus speed and other “external” parameters is not interesting for me, as all of this parameters is highly subjective, both cameras has a big list of fans among professional photographers.
What I was curious to see is an actual difference in the image quality, especially in macro and around macro world: this is most important for me as a product photographer.
Hasselblad had 120mm F4 HC macro lens, Canon was wearing 100mm F2.8L IS macro.
test setup:
Two very different object were photographed: one high contrast, high reflective jewelry piece and a live flower, it’s full of pollen stamen in particular. Exactly the same lighting and shooting distance were used for both cameras.
First, we shoot a sequence of different apertures to see how DOF is changed, but most important, how diffraction started to become an issue. This is very interesting to me, as many times I have go with as deep as possible DOF while working with various products, and knowing how much sharpness and details I will lose when closing aperture down is quite important to know.
Obviously, this was more like a lens test, as lens plays the main role in fighting (or helping) with a diffraction, but this is what I need as well: both cameras had best mainstream macro lens on them, and moist likely I would use the same HC 120mm lens on Hasselblad when (if) I decide to switch over to a Hasselblad system.
BTW, the super shallow DOF because of a larger physical sensor size, which always refers as an advantage of the medium format systems over 35mm ones, is not an advantage for me: Working about 5 years as a product photographer, I’ve never needed a super-shallow DOF. Instead, in most cases I need as super-deep DOF, and quite often I do a focus-stacking to get that desired deepness.
Second test was done by shooting both overexposed and underexposed images of that jewelry: high contrast, deep dark areas and bright silver makes already complicated shoot even more harder job for a camera to capture when under/overexposed.
For Hasselblad I was using Phocus 2.5.2 software to convert, adjust and generate lossless TIFF files, which was cut in Photoshop for this article. I found that Phocus works better in recovering dark or bright areas then Photoshop.
For Canon, all image manipulations were done in Photoshop CS5 and it’s RAW converter. No other editing were applied: sharpness was set to “high” for Hasselblad, default sharpening for Canon files in Adobe RAW converter. This settings seem to match Hasselblad’s “high” by the amount of sharpening. White balance was set to match flash color: K5700. No other white balancing was done: I want to use a default color from a camera RAW to see the color difference as well. But definitely, this test was not about the color reproduction.
Test results, conclusion and the video from even is on the blog post:
http://www.akelstudio.com/blog/hass...non-1ds-markiii-what-do-we-get-for-the-money/
The video : http://vimeo.com/15308467
I can't really re-post the whole thing here as it will loose the mouse-over functionality, which works great for 'recovery" images.
Enjoy