Hi,
I would say I agree with Torger pretty much. 80 MP and 60 MP is a small difference resolutionwise, and with focus you either nail it or you don't. To make best use of the sensor you need to nail focus.
Personally, I am using a 3x monocular together with the Hasselblad PM5 prism for focusing. That gives 9x magnification. This is still not good enough to show actual focus, but works mostly good enough. Normally I shoot f/11, much in order to mitigate focusing errors with some DoF. This is with P45+.
Anders Torger uses f/16 to mitigate aliasing effects, I don't do that. F/11 doesn't have enough diffraction to affect aliasing.
Another point may be that we are doing to much pixel peeping. The microcontrast stuff is pretty much irrelevant in almost any case, except pixel peeping. Todays screens are at best 8MP. Prints can be any size, but visual impression is dominated by low to medium frequencies.
Defocusing affects all frequencies, so there is no reason to be sloppy.
Another point is that even with slight focusing errors, smaller pixels will give better image quality. MTF of the sensor is better and it can take a bit more sharpening.
The down side is that to make best use of the sensor we need to work in a more exacting way. More accurate focus, larger aperture with smaller DoF.
Best regards
Erik
Haven't tried an 80 megapixel back, however pixel size is only a little smaller so it seems unlikely that the difference from the 60 would be large. Joe Cornish used 80 megapixel on his Techno quite early on and when I asked him on the onlandscape forum back then he said he did not have any focusing issues.
That said I've noticed a major differences person to person how difficult they think it is to focus. I think it's a mix of eyesight, skill, what aperture you shoot at, and how picky you are on focusing results. One of the major reasons "pancake" cameras like the Alpa became popular is because they can focus quite precisely without ground glass.
What you typically shoot also matters, if you shoot infinity-focused landscapes or flat artworks for repro you will likely experience more difficulties than if you shoot 3D subjects at midrange to close. In the latter case it's generally more floating and variable where the optimal place of focus is so it doesn't matter as much exactly where focus sits.
Personally I get consistent result with a 20x loupe when focusing the Techno, nowadays I often skip to zoom and check as I'm quite confident of my skill. As I've become allergic to aliasing I often shoot at f/16 though, which does give quite some margin of error. I also typically shoot intimate landscape scenes where focus placement is more forgiving. When I've tried handholding and focusing a V at f/5.6 without loupe I get way off, even a 22 megapixel won't help me. It's much about practice though.
I've attached two pictures, the first is one then I experienced focus difficulty, focusing at 2km from a cliff at f/11 in haze conditions. I was not that confident I nailed it that day and having a high precision helical focusing ring at that moment would have been nice. When I got back to computer I could relax though as I indeed had nailed it. The second one is more typical of my style, close range, a bit of tilt involved, f/16. You can't fail on that really. So I think you should think through what type of scenes you regularly shoot as well.
