Thanks Doug.
I'm in NYC and may take you up on that offer in the new year. I do however see that the P65+ only allows exposures of 1 minute or less. Is there an anticipated update that will allow longer exposures (much like live view)?
In short: no.
Long exposure capabilities are not likely to improve significantly on the P65+ / P40+ from where they stand today. Since the 65+ launched the longest good exposure has about doubled due to improved firmware and software. With that latest firmware and software, and (depending on your usage and ambient temperature) 1 minute will look pretty good. Anything past that gets bad pretty fast. The engineers tell me they think they've done just about everything that can be done by firmware/software. So while this limit might be increased
a bit in the coming months the bottom line is that the Dalsa sensors just don't do long exposures as well as the Kodak P+ backs. The trade off is that the Dalsa chips do have some very favorable noise, color, and gradation characteristics.
If you do exposures longer than a minute on a regular basis then the 65+ is just not right for you. The Phase One P45+ will likely be the king of long exposures for the foreseeable future. That system can expose for 1 hour at normal ambient temperatures, and much longer in colder weather.
If you only occasionally do long exposures then you might consider these "work arounds" (again, I'm not saying any of these are ideal, and if good long exposure is critical or frequent to your usage then I've already stated this is not the right system for you).
- you can take multiple shots in a row at 1 minute and blend in software to decrease noise, and then push in post - effective for, in my experience, about a 1 stop gain assuming your subject is static
- you can turn the back to sensor plus mode and shoot at ISO200 for 1 minute. the resulting file will be 15 megapixels, that, due to lens quality, and the inherent sharpness gain of downsampling and lack of AA filter, will match a 1Ds III or 5D II 22 megapixel file for actual resolved subject detail
- you can open up a stop or two and, if DOF is not enough at the lower f-stop, stack two or three images in Helicon Focus
- you could buy a film back and a few rolls of film (of course you'll have to re-remember how to compensate for reciprocity failure!) for long exposures
Note that there are some very aggressive upgrade deals right now that end December 31.
Doug Peterson
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