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Hasselblad's 39-megapixel digital camera answers the $32,000 question.
It's hard to get your mind around the idea of a $32,000 camera. Every time you tell yourself, well, this is a Hasselblad after all and it does have a 48mm full-frame 39-megapixel image sensor and there is that elegant, bank-vault construction Hassies are known for, your brain keeps going back to the price.
Sure Hassel blads were the first cameras on the moon, but the new H3D-39 does cost an astronomical $32,000-and that's not even including a lens.
After you get over the sticker shock-and, believe me, once you start shooting pictures with this camera, you do begin to get over it-other related questions might pop into your mind. Is this what a $32,000 camera is supposed to feel like? Is this what an image from a $32,000 camera looks like? How does a shot from a 35mm "full-frame" camera that costs considerably less-the Canon EOS 5D, for example-compare to one from the Hasselblad H3D-39, which has over three times the resolution?
All these questions and many others were running through my head while I tested the Hasselblad H3D-39 recently with a photographer friend, Jason Groupp, at his Manhattan studio. While I got answers to most of my questions after trying out the camera, the overriding issue of whether this Hasselblad is worth the substantial investment requires some context.
WHAT'S IN A NAME?
Even in this fast-moving digital era, there's something about Hasselblad's name alone than can still evoke awe. So while the H3D-39's gaudy price tag has generated a fair amount of eye rolling, the fact that it's a Hasselblad is still enough, in some quarters, to justify the cost.
But even Hasselblad knows that if it doesn't start producing digital cameras that make a splash with photographers, its storied name will no longer be enough to keep it afloat. The Swedish company's biggest fear has to be a day when the Hasselblad name no longer evokes awe, but only shrugs.
In an effort to prevent that day from arriving, Hasselblad introduced the H3D-39 and its virtually identical counterpart, the 22-megapixel H3D-22, at Photokina last fall. Those two camera introductions were followed in January by the 31-megapixel H3D-31, which, while it doesn't quite have a...