Interface
Very brief summary of advantages for the Phase/Leaf digital back option:
- touch screen, retina-resolution LCD withe excellent color/brightness
- highly sophisticated, but very easy to use review system (largely due to intuitive nature of touchscreens and a straightforward UI) including...
---- exposure warning, with customizable level, which does not interrupt your view of the main image
---- 2-axis bubble level with on-board calibration, numerical or GUI readout, ability to view full screen or as a side-bar item (on IQ this also is embedded in the metadata for auto-perspective correction and auto horizon correction in Capture One)
---- customizable grid/guide system including drag-able guides
---- focus mask (IQ only) for at-a-glance evaluation of focus
---- double tap to zoom to immediately jump to 100%, exactly where you want to check, without further scrolling or button pushing
- review of the last 10 images possible when tethered, including zooming to 100%, focus mask, and exposure warning
Connectivity
- Uses Capture One, an industry standard for both image quality and tethered feature set
- USB3 and FW800 tethering
Color/Tone
- This will be highly subjective but definitely worth your evaluation. The three backs will produce different color and different tonal renderings. The difference between the Credo and IQ will be more subtle, than the difference between those two backs as the Hassy. The difference between the Hassy rendering and Credo/IQ rendering isn't down to just one thing; they are built around different sensors (Dalsa vs. Kodak), different internal components, different IR and CFA, and have different color profiles. There won't be any one right or wrong way to feel about these differences but in general (again, noting my inherent bias) you'll find more discussion of Dalsa in terms of a more subtle tonal transitions, smoother color, organic rendering and pleasant skintone and more discussion of Kodak as being more scientific, precise, and detailed in tonal transitions. The grain/noise pattern is also different; I feel Dalsa provides a more stochastic and gaussian spread of luminance noise, but it also has more single-pixel noise (fortunately handled very well in C1). It's also impossible to fully isolate the effect of any one part of the system (the sensor) since everything before and after it alters the outcome of the image, so these comments are coming from customers as well as my own shooting which includes portraits, fashion, weddings, and nude with both Kodak-based and Dalsa-based Phase systems and Dalsa-based Leaf systems. Ideally you should do your own shooting with each system; if impractical you get and examine raw files from each system - we have a catalog of several thousand raw files from nearly every combination of lens, sensor, and genre that we can pull from for clients working with us.
