I just received an email from Phase One touting this new (I Think!) "iXG Cultural Heritage Camera System". It looks to be a MF back and lens that you would mount on a copy stand to, I guess, make copies of something. But for the life of me, the "Cultural Heritage" moniker just does not compute. What am I missing?
That's understandable. It's a niche term, so if it's not ringing any bells it just means you aren't living in that niche world!
The term "Cultural Heritage" (in this context) refers to museums, libraries, archives, universities, art reproduction facilities and similar. Their mission is to protect, preserve, and propagate our shared
cultural heritage (Wikipedia: "the legacy of physical science artifacts and intangible attributes of a group or society that are inherited from past generations, maintained in the present and bestowed for the benefit of future generations."), and part of that mission is digitization (a scan or photo or other digital representation of a real world object like a document, photographic film, statue, artifact etc).
See also:
DT Division of Cultural Heritage.
The iXG would make a pretty terrible sports camera or portrait camera, but it does phenomenally well at sitting on a copy stand, pointed down, capturing hundreds or thousands of images per day for years at a time. That's a use case general-purpose cameras like a Canon or Nikon dSLR can be used for, but are a bit fish-out-of-water. For example on a general purpose SLR the focus of the lens tends to slowly drift when pointed downward. You can ameliorate that somewhat by adding a rubber band, but even then the trend is that the lens will "settle in" to the elastic stretch of the rubber band over a period. The iXG focus system uses a linear slide with 6 micron accuracy and repeatability and zero slip.
Other examples of the
Phase One iXG Camera specialization for copy-stand work:
- There is no grip, no top LCD, no battery, and no CF card slot
- The shutter is warrantied for a million captures
- It's native operation is via a self-locking lemo AC power cable (most general purpose cameras have an option to run off AC but do so through a flimsy port that is easy to have come off accidentally)
- Every single feature is controllable remotely within Capture One; in fact it's assumed the user will rarely, if ever, touch the camera itself
- It can do contrast-based autofocus within Capture One for absolute precise focus, it uses specialized Schneider lenses designed for high resolution flat-field reproduction imaging.
- Every lens/camera combo is tested for absolutely perfectly alignment (both lens-internal alignment and the alignment of the lens to the sensor)
- It pairs with
Capture One Cultural Heritage Edition- It has an extremely heavy duty L bracket built in to it's native design, which is extremely precisely made to be perpendicular to the camera.
- There will be some
very cool features that integrate it with DT Copy Stands like the
DT RGC180 and
DT RG3040 and
DT Atom; more details on that when they are ready to release.
In the last decade there has been a massive shift among institutions of cultural heritage institutions away from legacy flatbed scanners and planetary scanners toward instant capture solutions (taking pictures of things with cameras). The former are slow, low in image quality, and lack modern software and features. The latter, when combined with cameras and software made specifically for the purpose offers high speed, great image quality, and a modern featureful software. Nowhere is that trend more pronounced than in film scanning where drum scanners and desktop film scanners are being replaced by systems like the
DT Film Scanning Kit which is faster, produces better image quality, and has modern software and hardware support. This camera is a reaction to that trend away from scanners to cameras; the more you use cameras for high volume copystand work the easier it is to justify a camera system designed to rock at copystand work.
We also sell a good number of
DT Rcam + XF kits to Cultural Heritage institutions. The advantage of that is the modularity; you can remove the digital back from the
DT RCam (which is similar to the iXG in that it is designed for copy-stand work) and place it on an XF for more general purpose photography (e.g. to shoot an installation art piece or an architectural shot of the institution).