Well, the skintone issue is real whether you believe it or not. ................. By contrast, skin out of my P back always looks like real skin regardless of the light it was shot under and regardless of the person's ethnicity.
As for pattern moire on your DB, if you get one that has smaller sensuls -- meaning a higher resolution back -- pattern moire becomes much less of an issue. Color moire is a different animal and agreed, it is a PITA to deal with.
Cheers,
With all due respect, this is not necessarily true. You can line up 7 cameras and under the same lighting, subject, exposure get 7 different results and depending on the lighting, subject and exposure find one is more pleasing than the other. I am positive on this as I have owned 5 digital backs, 12 dslrs and one digital rangefinder and at one time or another compared one, two, even three cameras to see the results.
I have shot as many different ethnic skintones with different cameras around the world as anyone and can promise you there is no holy grail, though for basic easy to hit color the dslrs are usually much easier.
With mfdb's ambient color shows more in soft subdued light, light overcast, or silked light than it does with direct or hard light, though most digital backs do not like abrupt hard light transitions and tend to throw a magenta curve on skin going from light to dark, usually more noticeable on white translucent skin (every model in NY).
Digital backs overall, and depending on the processor are very sensitive when it comes to ambient color, digital in general reads ambient color different than most films, but digital backs are the worst or best depending on subject.
Still, when you talk "pleasing" color it covers a lot of territory and a lot of different steps. Step 1 is what you and the client sees in first view, whether it's on the computer or the camera lcd. Medium format lcd's are almost impossible to read so don't bother showing those to the client, the newer dslrs are quite good. In fact shoot a d3x, d3, d700 next to a mfdb untethered and show the images to the client.
They will point to then Nikon and say, will you use the "Big" camera for this.
The second step is in processing for web galleries or contact sheets. That is probably the hardest to produce as you want to get close to the final look without spending 33 hours per shoot day in post.
The third step is the first round of high rez processing and regardless of the processor, nearly all digital requires a certain amount of work in photoshop just to get to a film emulation look. Once again lighting, subject, backgrounds can make this a fairly easy step or difficult.
The fourth and final step is the final retouching stage and this is the great equalizer. All digital images from ANY digital camera if done right can be made to look good to exceptional, though once again it requires local not global corrections and a very refined level of skill.
Bottom line, if you shoot people the dslrs are just easier. Easier to shoot, easier to process, easier to chose almost any converter. They may be a little more color dumb, but so was film, though they also don't pick up such fine irregularities that you see every imperfection.
The one exception to this is tungsten. I do find the p30+ to read tungsten light on skin much better than the dslrs.
As far as pattern moire, digital backs (at least the 5 I've owned will moire on certain patterns at a rate of 20 to 1 compared to the dslrs).
Nothing is harder to remove than pattern moire, color moire can usually be painted out, and if I am shooting on figure fashion with a db, we must tether and process out high rez on certain garments, knowing there will be issues. Usually we shoot the session, review the select, shoot close to the same pose again though closer in as to replaced the artifacts with a tighter image. With challanged garments you must shoot a medium format back tethered to know if the moire is real or an lcd abberation.
With the dslrs we just shoot.
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