So, Medium Format?

Is it worth it? Is it really?

I recently spent a couple of days relaxing on Burano, an island in the Venitian lagoon known for its brightly coloured houses and alarmingly leaning church tower. It’s a great place for photography, and I decided that this time I would shoot Hasselblad medium format digital and nothing else. It’s actually the first time I’ve ever taken just the X1Dii on a trip, with no alternative, despite owning it for over 3 years.

First things first, I really enjoy using the X1Dii. It is very comfortable to hold, surprisingly light, and the few controls it has are easily accessible. The menu system has been called the best on the market, and I wouldn’t argue with that. The viewfinder is extremely nice, although a little dim and non-adjustable. And it looks fantastic, and if that’s not a factor, you probably don’t have much of a creative spark - never mind all this “a camera is just a tool” BS. Sure, of course it’s a tool, but a tool can be inspiring, or not, and that is not irrelevant to enjoying photography.

Having said all that, I can’t think of many cameras I actually did NOT enjoy using. Just three, in fact: the Olympus Pen F, which was really painful to hold, the Sigma dp2 & dp3, which in very constricted circumstances gave fabulous output, but handled like bricks, and the Sigma sdH, which was fine until you put one of the MASSIVE SA-Mount lenses on the front. Well, I could add the cumbersome Linhof 612, but that’s a film camera.

So, the X1Dii is great to use, produces superlative output, and is quite light enough to carry with 3 lenses (28mm f/4, 45mm f/3.2, 90mm f/3.2) all day in a shoulder bag. I processed all the photos in Hasselblad Phocus (more about that in a later post), output them as TIFs and loaded them into my CaptureOne catalog. I then created a smart album on keyword “Burano”, …. and that’s where the fun starts.

You see Capture One also correctly loaded some photos I took back in 2014 in Burano, using a humble 12 Megapixel Olympus PEN E-P3, with the much maligned (but for me, very favoured) 17mm f/1.8 lens. Apart from the fact that my 2014 photos were clearly rather hurried, at a very first glance at the thumbnails, there’s nothing generic that tells them apart from the 2024 50 Megapixel Hasselblad X1Dii shots.

Digging through the two sets, I managed to find two photos, one from 2014, and one from 2024, taken of more or less the same scene - house 595.

Olympus E-P3 on the left, Hasselblad X1Dii on the right. Ten years apart.

Clearly time has not been kind to House 595, although it was already a little rough around the edges in 2014. Clearly the lighting is different, the framing is different, although the full-frame equivalent of both lenses is roughly the same, around 35mm, and the subject has evolved. But still, from a perceptual point of view, the two photos can be compared. In both cases the only manipulations are minor exposure adjustment, and a touch of clarity. Both use the respective raw developer’s default profile.

So does the shot on the right (medium format Hasselblad) overpower the shot on the left (old, tiny sensor Olympus?). Uncomfortably, not really. It is possible that the colours from the Hasselblad, especially the yellow, are more accurate, even more pleasing, but that may be also due to lighting and colour fading over 10 years. But I’m clutching at straws.

What about resolution, if that even matters? Let’s take a look at a 100% crop of the Olympus matched with a similar zoom for the Hasselblad:

Olympus E-P3 on the left at 100% zoom, Hasselblad X1Dii on the right.

Honestly, is the Olympus giving away much here? I don’t think so. Obviously we can zoom in a lot further with the Hasselblad, but unless we don’t need to print above A3 it isn’t very relevant. On paper the Hasselblad has significantly greater dynamic range, which may just be visible here, and would certainly be a factor in other scenes, but again, I’m not sure quite how much in the real world.

Let’s be clear, this is a totally, completely, baseless comparison. It’s past subjective. But actually I’m not sure that “subjective” is meaningless in this context. Even as one who has invested what for me are vast sums in digital medium format, I’m still on the fence about its objective benefits. Sure, you can find endless charts and “tests” produced by engineer-photographers on various interwebs objectively demonstrating everything and nothing with absolute precision. But what do these tell me about the experience of making and enjoying photos? Pretty much nothing. Nobody and nothing can help to tell me how to react subjectively: it’s all down to the inside of my head.

So what am I telling myself here? That I should have stayed with the Olympus Pen E-P3, that no subsequent camera “upgrade” has actually had any benefit? Perhaps even that was several steps too far - I still have photos from my 2003 Olympus E-1 in my favourites. Gear really doesn’t matter? Really?

Well, when I’m in the zone with the X1Dii, it’s really something else. The look of shots on the luxuriously huge, contrasty rear screen convince me that we’re really on a different level here. That yes, this is worth 4x or 6x or whatever times the price of the Olympus OM-1. Even when downloading and editing, the feeling remains, and hitting zoom at 100% reveals the incredible level of detail. I’m convinced I have photos here I could not have taken with any other camera (well, yeah, ok, there is the dp0 Quattro sitting on the shelf over there). This gear-induced high continues, urging me once again to consider the unthinkable upgrade to an X2D. And then…

And then I compare a shot to a similar one taken on a far more humble camera 10 years older.

Is it worth it? Is it really? It is. It must be. Mustn’t it?