After the recent huge drop of medium format prices I bought a mamiya adf III in combination with a leaf 65s for a pretty reasonable price. I love the camera as I loved my old 645 af that kept going for at least 7 years without any problem.
I wouldn’t call the lenses - that I had already - mindblowing but they are fine and don’t have to fear the comparison with products of other companies.
The back does a great job as long as light conditions are fine and the files are well exposed.
What irritates me is the amount of noise that often appears in darker areas that don’t get much light and here I am definitely not complaining about a tiny bit of noise that hardly appears at 100%.
In a rather contrasty image i would call it almost cloggy and it needs a huge amount of filtering to bring it down to a still hardly acceptable look, definitely for the price of loss of detail.
Night shots look terrible noisy in certain areas and my old canon 5d actually does a better job in a exposure range of about 5 seconds. Three is a lot of talk about better dr of medium format backs. I am definitely not sure if that is true at least in a night shot. I found the canon better in tricky light situations and that’s quite disappointing to find out. Is there anybody out there who has some experience with the leaf back?
Even though leaf provides software I found that adobe raw converter still works better, specially when it comes to noise and definitely when it comes to speed.
www.wolfgang-bellwinkel.com
