Background: over a decade ago I shot primarily with medium format equipment. I eventually moved to a Fuji S2, then to a Fuji S5 Pro for wedding work. I'm now doing more personal work and I'm finding that the S5 simply isn't meeting my needs, but before I go out and spend a bunch of money and effort I wanted to get some opinions here.The issue: I'm looking for image quality comparable to what I used to get from medium format back in the day. I have some 40x60 inch prints that I printed from 645 negatives that are wonderful, but I'm not using the same processes that I used to. Back then it was carefully processed B&W negative film that was printed by professional printers for anything larger than 16x20. Now my workflow has moved to digital and I've been happy with the switch, except that I find that 16x20 is really pushing it for the images that come out of my camera. I want to be able to print to 40x60 for those (unfortunately very rare) images worthy of large printing again. Most won't get this treatment, but I don't want to be disappointed with an image that I'm really pleased with because it can't be printed as large as I would like.I still "see" in black and white, but I'm no longer at a point in my life where I wish to process everything myself, and I'm reasonably happy with B&W conversions and digital printing (I'll likely depend on professionals for big prints for the forseeable future.)The decision: Do I go back to film? I'm looking at KEH's web site and I see some amazing prices on quality gear. Good 645 kit from Mamiya and Pentax can be had for $1,000 or so for a complete system, the Fuji rangefinders are very affordable at sizes from 645 to 6x9 (though are limited to a single focal length, with all the advantages and disadvantages that implies), and the Bronica RF is even affordable. Unfortunately the Mamiya 7 is quite pricy, so that's probably out in the short term.I have no idea who does good processing though (ideally with scans of the images for post-processing indexing and planning), and I don't really know what price to budget for per roll of 120 film. To be honest I don't even know whether I should be shooting slides (which I still love) or negative film if my intent is to send the film to a lab to be scanned and printed at their facility. When I was last shooting weddings with film (with Leica and Mamiya rangefinders, which in hindsight I should have never sold) I was budgeting about $1 per frame for film, processing, and proofing. Is that still a reasonable price point?I'd love to hear that something like an A900 can produce the kind of image quality that would allow for big enlargements, but I doubt that's the case other than for portraits (something I'm moving away from.) The digital backs likely can, but the cheapest point of entry seems to be Mamiya with a $9,999 entry fee.Can someone give me some guidance?Are there any reasonable projections that would indicate when digital alternatives will be viable (even used)? I'd love it if someone could say that "for this image size you need a capture xxx megapixels in size, and following the history we can predict that these will be availeble in 20xx, and the used market tends to show a xx% reduction in value over 3 years, so you ought to be able to do this with used equipment in 20xx for less than $x,xxx in today's dollars." I seriously doubt this kind of analysis is available, however. To the moderators: this seemed like the best place for this. Please feel free to move it if there's a better spot.
