I'm quite confident that they don't have custom CFAs, but I don't have inside information, so I think Hassy's and Phase One's color response is highly similar, with the exception of the IR filter in front of the sensor which of course can have some effect on some highly saturated colors.
That Hasselblad makes their cameras look alike is as far as I can tell a profile design decision, just like it's a design decision by Phase One to instead differentiate their cameras. You can make the Kodak to look neutral with some LUT stretching, it's just considerable more difficult to design a robust profile. Hasselblad's look is pretty neutral, much more neutral than Phase One. I have a H4D-50 myself and have looked at its Hassy colors quite closely and compared to what my own camera profiler puts out. Hassy makes some subtle subjective adjustments plus quite extensive gamut compression, but overall a very natural look. If you design a profile with DCamProf and apply my "neutral+" look, is not too different from Hasselblad's, which is no coincidence as I like to learn from the best and they've been a source of inspiration.
The reproduction use case is "simple"; oh well, it's a difficult craft to make it right, but you can rely on instruments and you don't need to modulate the response with contrast. My color profiling software is not designed towards the reproduction use case (although it can be used with it), but is intended to make general purpose profiles, optionally with a designed look.
My taste concerning designed looks is that I think Hasselblad's way is good, the goal is to make all cameras to look the same, and the base look is neutral but pleasing (which coarsely means slight warmup and saturation increase). It's a good starting point to add a personal look if you want that.
I don't like Phase One's approach where the goal is to create a much more subjective look and differentiate products so when you upgrade your back you get a new look. I also don't think it's good design to put out a heavily subjective look as the default and really no way to get a neutral one,
I want to be in control of
my color, rather than relying on the "Image Quality Professor"'s personal taste. Anyway, the reason it is the way it is, is because we never really left the film era. The raw processing pipelines today are designed with the intention that the camera profile is the "film roll" and should just like film apply a look.
A more modern way to do things would be to simply just record the CFA response in the EXIF data, have no camera profiles at all, but instead the raw pipeline would create neutral color directly from CFA and handle things like gamut compression automatically (instead of static in the profile like today), and then you could optionally apply pre-defined "look profiles". That's not going to happen though. It would look nicer under the hood, but wouldn't change user experience much, so it's not worth the risk fiddling around with the sensitive subject color is.
Many (most?) other profile maker software available to us consumers are by the way broken by design. What they do is that they make a linear reproduction style profile based on a color checker, and then just blindly apply a RGB tonecurve (or RGB-HSV in case of DNG) on top and assumes that the tonecurve with it's color distortions applies a pleasing look. Well, actually an RGB tonecurve
does make a pleasing saturation increase together with it's slight distortions so that's why they get away with it, but it's a mindless way of designing a general-purpose profile. The commercial profiles from the big houses use more advanced and proprietary methods not available to consumers. It was for this reason I started out with my own profile making software project.
And indeed, my goal is the same. To make my next camera give me the same look, regardless of which brand I choose. (And of course that the look is of so high quality I feel I can use it instead of the manufacturer-provided profiles.)
Have you tried the Dalsa CCDs from Hasselblad or just the ones from Phase One?
I am asking, because I know from experience that the H4D-60 gives exactly the same colours as the H3D-39. I have had someone who had the two cameras take a few pictures under various lights and send me the results. I know that Phase One gives slightly different colours. It could just be the profile, or it could be that the manufacturers are also able to have a particular set of colour filters mounted on the sensors.
I also agree that Kodak CCDs appear to mimic a film response. It is a big plus for me and the reason I use an H4D-50: I am looking for that particular rendition.
The whole discussion here appears to revolve around the idea of calibrating a camera so that it reproduces a colour chart perfectly. I don't want to do that. I am not in the business of reproducing paintings. I want my landscape pictures to have a particular rendition that reminds me of film, without going into the excesses of instagram filters. I also don't want the overly saturated look, sort of David Kinkade on acid, that is popular on 500pix. I want good separation between various leaf green tones and I want them to look different under sunlight and under the clouds.
I get all of this with my present camera. On the minus side, I get more colour shifts under poor artificial lights than with my 24x36, but I can live with that.
I want my next camera to give me the same colours. Maybe I just need a profile, I don't know. All I know is that I am not going to take a colour chart with me every day and include it in all of my pictures as a reference.
