Much is being said about digital cameras these days, and even though some purists still think film is the only way to go, I think digital cameras will take over eventually. Camera equipment manufacturer Nikon has already said it will cease making most of its film cameras, just leaving the F6, its top of the line model, and the FM10, their basic manual everything model.
One area in which digital has not really made big inroads is the medium format market, being ruled by Hasselblad, Mamiya and others. Maybe it is because of the very expensive equipment one starts talking baout when you enter this arena, I don't know... There has been digital backs for a number of years (these are basicly just the film part of a normal medium format camera which has been replaced by a digital counterpart), but these are big and cumbersome and are not really suited for field work, more for studio photography. Mkae no mistake, the results are awesome, but these things were big! Hasselblad also released a digital camera about 18 months ago, although I am not sure how it fared.
But now, Hasselblad has released the next incarnation of its top of the line digital medium format camera, the H2D39. Well this whopper has a digital censor that is 39 Megapixels in size! To put it in perspective, the Canon 350D, one of the most popular consumer digital SLR cameras, only has 8 Megapixels.
There are only two problems when it comes to digital cameras that has censors that size: price and storage space. From what I've read one Hasselblad H2D39 will set you back in the order of about R250 000, and that is the price converted from dollars. Heaven knows what it will cost once the importers and everybody put on their profits here... The other is storgae space. I calculated that one RAW picture from that censor, at 24 bit colour, uncompressed will take up round about 100MB of storage space. So, on a 4GB Compact Flash card - the biggest available at this point - you would only get 40 or so pictures. Undoubtedly there ill be some compression applied that will raise that number to 50 or 60 images per card, but still, in digital terms it is not that much. I read that you can buy an external hard drive for the camera, but how big is that going to be? And with what will you power it? And all these things will have to be carried around, too...
So I think something must be done with regards to removeable storage to get the capacities bigger. And cameras like the Hasselblad one will probably provide the impetus for the removeable storage manufacturers to get on with it. I will not be surprised if we see compactflash cards with capacities the size of computer hard discs (80GB+) in the near future. The only thing that can be said is that there are exciting times ahead...
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