A beautiful madness.

I have no better words to describe my newly arrived Hasselblad 907x 100c. And the XCD 4/28P lens.

It is a beautiful piece of machinery that will cost you an arm and a leg. It does not make any sense from a cost / effectiveness point of view.

Yet it does make sense if you think with your heart.

First impressions

If, like me, you had never used a waist level camera before in your life – no Hasselblad experience whatsoever – then this is what you will feel: a complete shock to the system.

You feel lost, you feel a bit of panic because you are holding a camera, but you are not in control.

Nothing prepared you for this. You are literally holding a square box that happens to be a camera.

Your index finger is not falling on top of a shutter button. Your thumb is not falling on a scroll wheel.

It’s all good

Yet this camera is actually very intuitive and user friendly. After half-day shooting around, it quickly became second nature to me. This is a beautiful camera with no useless bells and whistles.

Mouth watering IQ

Stunning output. The colours and gradations are gorgeous.

No IBIS

No IBIS – no problem. Yes, IBIS is important, especially when dealing with 100 MP resolution. But then again, let me say this: don’t ever judge the quality of a photo by its sharpness.

Photography is an art form and we shall not shoot for the specs.

I come from the days when there was no IBIS. We shot 35mm film. We discussed sharpness, but not at pixel-peeping level. I’m old school.

So no IBIS – no problem.

Learning

Yes, this is early days for me.

Yesterday I shot RAW+JPEG, then spent some time comparing the outputs. Downloaded Phocus app from Hasselblad. Used in both my Mac and my iPhone.

According to Hasselblad, with Phocus you bring out the best from the camera’s 16-bit colour, 200MB size RAW files. Still a lot to learn.

More to come. Stay tuned.