Love this subject! Great reading thru all the posts, good info for anyone just getting involved in this biz for sure
I have dedicated a large portion of my life and experience to art repro capture, and run a very successful group of studios one of which is entirely dedicated to this very subject. Not our bread and butter, but enough to employ 3 highly skilled and experienced craftsmen, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment and studio space.
My firm belief is that info gleaned from art repro capture research is immediately applied to our commercial work and vice versa.
I don't think the initial question "Best camera setup for art repro...?" is a serious one.
Analogous to a question like "what is the best car for driving on mountain roads?"
-Are we racing? Is speed an issue? whats our budget? Will there be weather? who are our passengers? Is comfort an issue? Are they paying for the trip? will there be sand, or water, or rocks on our path? How much gas do we need?...etc
We have many clients for art repro capture and reproduction but most are private collections, large museums, some really high end well heeled artists, and insurance companies.
One of the posts earlier in this discussion stated that $1000 for a single image was very high. I can assure you that $1000+/image is not considered crazy expensive, in fact, its fairly commonplace. We just completed a single capture for a museum reproduction for over $10k. Mind you we are not just one photographer with a bitchin camera and a computer, but a highly skilled team of specialists who have all been doing this for major museums and artists since the 70’s and film days. So though $10K might seem like a bundle, it is very small compared to value of the painting we were hired to capture...and we were hired to do it twice! (before and after restoration) The restoration work on this single painting alone cost over $100K. Just the scaffolding costs were close to that.
We have most if not all of the gear mentioned in this thread but over 50% of the time we have found that a highly skilled and experienced operator who knows how to properly light, expose, post-proc using C1 with an 80MP CCD MFD back and corresponding lenses is our go to system.
Recently (Fall 2014) we went up against a skilled competitor who uses the Sinar system and we bid using our Credo80 system and our team. We both had to show accuracy and competence on a smaller piece about 6ft x 9ft (valued at $12 million!)
In the end, we won the contract based on a variety of factors but our color accuracy was said to be the most important factor.
So although, on paper, I agree that a true-color type system with multi-pop or scan back should be more accurate, there are many more factors that go into the equation and should be considered.
For instance, we tested out the Hassy 200MP MS and though on paper it looked like a winner, in real world testing, the 6pop multistep tech did not work so good, suffered from misregistration, and was extremely susceptible to even the most minute vibrations. Even when bolted to a concrete floor we had problems with it.
