At the end of last year i decided to go for the H3dII 31 series camera. I have been using leaf, phase and hasselblad digital back's for over nine years now and the last years i felt very happy with my 39CF back. However: i do a lot of shooting in heavy industry, often under bad light conditions, and the H3dII31Mp seemed the answer to my prayers.......
It is a god's sent. Before, i had to use my wonderful Canon 5D when high speed iso was demanded but now i can perfectly use my Hassie.
There is a lot of discussion about the MFB against the new DSLR cameras and i can assure you that when shooting under a mixture of sodium, tungsten, TL, mercury vapor etc. wich are often used as industrial light sources, you will get nowwhere with a DSLR.
They simply do not have the file quality to correct those difficult lighthing differences in a for the human eye pleasing way. The hasselblad CF39/CFH22 i previously used simply did do the job perfectly.
But now back again to my new "working tool of perfection".
The nice thing about the H3d 31mp is the abillity to shoot 800 iso standard out of the box and this at a quality level that easally surpasses my 5d. But it gets even better: when under exposing up to 2 stops ( that is 3200 iso for who is interested :-) ) and set the exposure correction slider in Flexcolor to +2 stops you will get perfect usuable images of almost the same and often surpassing my 5D's IQ . And as mentioned before: also under the most demanding light mixtures.
As for the ugly IR-filter related blooming i have not been able to achieve a picture or setup where this phenomena became visible, so i suppose it has been fixed with the new IR filter.
The capability to upsize the files, lets say up to 200 percent is in one word perfect, and the nicest rendering i ever had with any of my backs. Almost no artifacts and very clean detailed images of more than 300 Mb where the result.
The only thing i have to do now is order the 28mm because i really loved the 35 on my H2d.
The 100mm 2.2 becomes with the slightly smaller sensor my favored all purpose people and things lens. The buttersweet bokeh, combined with the extreme shallow DOF makes it a dream to use. And combined with the 1.7 converter a powerfull telephoto lens comes available without the need to carry an extra (heavy) lens. Writing speed to the CF cards also seemes faster than on my CFH, but this might also be a feeling and not actual be the case. Mirror slapping also improved and small details made a very good product even better. For my Mamiya RZ and fuji GX680 i am now waiting for a CF22 to arrive because i still love to use those camera's in studio for still-live and more. However, i still love to work with the ixpress 96C because of its nice big pixels and square format i think the H3DII31 will rapidly become my most used camera and making the 5d staying in the camera bag more than i ever hoped for.
For those who are interested, i am not a pixel peeper i use my camera's as they are supposed to be used: like the hammer of a carpenter or the trumpet of a musician and not to examen wheter the investment is really better than my DSLR( wich ofcourse can easely be seen)
Goodnight and good luck :-)
