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I've just found the ultimate digital camera for taking fish photos.

The Hasselblad H2D-39 medium format digital SLR is the stuff that dreams are made of. How does a 39 megapixel sensor sound to you? Yes, that's right, a THIRTY NINE MEGAPIXEL sensor - twice the size of a 35mm photographic negative. Needless to say you won't lose much detail on that ... plus, as the camera is a bona fide SLR, with interchangeable lenses, you can find a lens to suit the application ... from a macro lens for shooting tiny fry to a nice wide-angle for photographing those Whale Sharks at that Japanese public aquarium.

You can take a look at Hasselblad's own website here]http://www.hasselblad.co.uk/ (this is the UK version, but its content is broadly the same as the US version of the Hasselblad website) and click on the little buttons down the left to bring up the H2D-39 product details, or you can go [link=here and take a look at a quick and dirty review of the beast.

Just one tiny fiy in the ointment here.

The US price tag is around $31,000. Yes, you read that correctly. That's the 'body only' price. Throw in the price of the lenses on top of that, and the super-huge CF card it's going to need to handle the file sizes resulting from a 39 megapixel sensor (one of the accessories is a 512 gigabyte CF card - yes, you read that correctly, FIVE HUNDRED AND TWELVE GIGABYTES ...) and you're kissing goodbye to around $40,000 US. Or, here in the UK, this is a £25,000 piece of kit. Just the sort of thing for the person who wants to engage in a bit of one-upmanship by saying "Ha, my camera cost more than my neighbour's BMW ...".

Go take a look and drool over this shiny toy. OK, most of us here would have to work for 15 years to be able to afford one, but it's nice to see that someone is making shiny toys for us to lust over. Of course, professional photographers will be laying their hands on this kit courtesy of the likes of national newspapers, who budget for this kind of photographic firepower as a matter of course and team it up with their top snappers, but who knows, there may be someone on this Board who's rich enough to own one and just hasn't told us yet ...

Think of the fish pics you could take with that baby though ... trouble being that for the price, you could set up one truly astounding saltwater reef system and photograph it with something a bit cheaper ...




Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

The page cannot be found.

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I'm not your neighbor, you Bakersfield trash.

Bleh.

Try This link and progress from there.

Also, the link I forgot to add to the original post - Quick and dirty review

Hopefully that should make amends for the broken links above. Unless of course you subscribe to the view that my supplying these links constitutes torture


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

$31,000? What a ripoff...

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I'm not your neighbor, you Bakersfield trash.

What spend all my weekly pocket money on a camera. What dreams are made of.

Keith

Near enough is not good enough, therefore good enough is not near enough, and only your best will do.
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Oh to those who aren't camera fiends Natalie, it DOES seem like an obscene amount of money to pay for a camera. But to those in the know, they'll just nod and say "Ah, it's a Hasselblad" ...

In the world of medium format cameras, Hasselblad have had for many years a peerless reputation for quality. Which is why Hasselblad cameras were chosen for the Apollo Moon missions. One of the less then happy aspects of that being that in order to save weight on the return journey, the Apollo astronauts had to leave behind the camera bodies. So, if someone wishes to engage in a spot of salvage sometime, there's six Hasselblad camera bodies on the Moon, complete with lenses, and aside from the effects of space weathering, they will be in near-pristine condition when found. They'll be worth a bit too - NASA paid something like $40 million for those camera bodies because they were made to very exacting specifications, and Hasselblad were the only camera manufacturers who accepted the challenge to meet those tight specifications. So, the reputation of Hasselblad as being superb camera engineers has, needless to say, led to even more inflated prices for their equipment than before.

As for this latest model, well, you're paying in this instance for a camera that is guaranteed to outlast YOU. You're also paying for a service contract second to none - if anything goes wrong with it, Hasselblad will fix if even if they have to fly out engineers from Sweden to do it. Said engineers will knock upon your door, take away your camera, and hand you a shiny new replacement for the duration. These things exist on a rarefied plane, alongside the Bugatti Royale, Chateau Mouton Rothschild and Laphroaig 40 Year Old Special Reserve - you're paying for something that is well and truly out of the ordinary, just the same as you would be paying for something out of the ordinary if you blew £4,000 on a Paracentropyge boylei Angelfish


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

It would be interesting to see how much a hasselblad actually costs to manufacture versus its recommended retail price. Im pretty sure a canon eos mark2 could do everything I could concievably need at a relative bargain price of around £4000 . I cant see the need for the massive resolution of the hasselblad, unless I was into producing house-sized prints. Can you imagine how long it would take to download a set of prints to a computer, even using a firewire? Then of course youd need a computer like an apple a mesh or an alienware with a terabyte of storage at least, to store the data from even a single days shooting.... and as for waiting for a printer to rasterise the image... anyone got a few spare days?

Cool camera, and yet probably still a pain in the bum to use.

Ironically, big prints for use on billboards use lower resolution - around 50 dpiu - because they're not intended to be viewed close up. The huge resolution is for studio work. Which is why for studio work, 35mm SLRs have their uses, but tend to be supplanted for the highest quality by 6x9 medium format SLRs that use huge negatives. This is an attempt to produce similar resolution in a digital camera, and from what I can gather, those who have been fortunate enough to use one are happy with the results. Mind you, most of us here would baulk at the thought of a file that occupies 78 megabytes of disc space in JPEG format, and who knows how much space in PhotoShop Digital Negative format ... which is why the camera has the built in ability to operate with external hot-swappable hard drives. With a camera like this, you don't plug the camera into the PC, you write the file straight to an external hard drive, then plug the external hard drive into the PC and use the faster data transfer rate to cope with the huge file sizes.

For really top quality work involving, for example, a fashion magazine photo shoot, 120 or 220 film negatives were the norm in the pre-digital age because the resulting prints could be printed at 1200 dpi on an A4 page. Fashion houses like Chanel and magazines like Vogue tend to operate on the principle that quality is worth spending money on - they operate up to a specification, not down to a price. Likewise, anyone who is interested in scientific photography will want one of these because it delivers the image resolution required for the most demanding applications - macro photography of botanical subjects for example, where you want to be able to count the individual pollen grains on the stigma of a flower, or be able to map the wing venation of an insect to the point where the photograph is good enough to be compared with the original taxonomic description of the insect. I've shot dragonfly photos with 35mm film in which you can count the hairs on the dragonfly's legs - with this resolution, you'd be able to determine if the hairs themselves had fine structure.


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

Snort.

And the lenses will set you back a few grand each too. Not to mention a 75mm lens on a hassy is equivalent to a wide angle on 35mm also.

Yeah, I looked at one of those, but I've done more than enough 30x40 prints from my 8 megapixel 20D to warrant the cost.

Next up - 1DMKIIN - or whatever canon is offering during the next round of photokina next week.

Likewise, anyone who is interested in scientific photography will want one of these because it delivers the image resolution required for the most demanding applications - macro photography of botanical subjects for example, where you want to be able to count the individual pollen grains on the stigma of a flower, or be able to map the wing venation of an insect to the point where the photograph is good enough to be compared with the original taxonomic description of the insect. I've shot dragonfly photos with 35mm film in which you can count the hairs on the dragonfly's legs - with this resolution, you'd be able to determine if the hairs themselves had fine structure.

Thats what the canon MP-E 65mm macro is for. 5x lifesize with no extension tubes. And with what you're describing, you'd NEED top quality glass by leica or zeiss T* lenses to be able to capture the detail required.

I know ALOT of photographers that have the 1Ds MKII with its 16.7mp that use only leica or zeiss optics for that very reason. They'll happily spend about $3000 on a 35mm lens to get that corner to coner sharpness that these beasts of cameras require.

leica or zeiss optics

Oh, Leica. Another name that invokes visions of bank managers having heart attacks.

Oh yes, Leica optics are superb, but again, they're built up to a specification, not down to a price ... which means that when you write out the cheque for any piece of Leica kit, you're almost in Hasselblad territory just for their 35mm SLR equipment. Nice to be able to daydream about owning such equipment though.



Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

Leica fan, eh Cali? Well then have I got a link for you... http://www.dpreview.com/articles/leicam8/

I'm with Dallas on this one though. The mega-pixal push is not what it's cracked up to be. I'd much rather have a silky smooth 8MP APS sized sensor than the same sized sensor with 12MP stuffed into it resulting in crummy ISO above 800. For practical purposes I doubt 90% of people NEED more than 8.

I like the direction Canon went with the 5D, full-frame is definetely appealing to me. I wish Nikon or Sony would follow suit. We shall see...

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Back in the saddle!

That's a shnazzy camera...

But yea, I've gotta go with Lisa on this one--gotta have leica optics...

I've got a Leica microscope, and it's insanely high quality stuff