Details and Results: Luminous Landscape 5/16/06

Imagine being in a studio with Phase One P45, P30, and P25 digital backs, along with a Hasselblad H1, Mamiya 645AFD, Canon 1D, Canon 1Ds MkII, Canon 5D, Linhof 679cs, Linhof 4X5, and enough lenses available for each camera to choke a reviewer. Then add three experienced photographers, who between them have more than 100 years of professional experience, all of whom are photographic educators and journalists, and one of whom is a respected imaging scientist.

What do you get? You get Charles Cramer, Bill Atkinson and Michael Reichmann working at Bill's studio / lab for a day, followed by many, many hours of printing and evaluation; producing...

What We Tested
A couple of days later, after taking care of some other matters in the Bay area, I returned to Bill's studio, along with Charlie, and videographer Chris Sanderson. Kevin wasn't with us, because he had other commitments, but also because we felt that his presence would be inappropriate during testing of his company's products. But, before leaving Kevin left us with a P25 and a P30 back for testing.

We tallied up what equipment we had available that day and found that we had the following for testing....

Phase One P45 back(s): 39 Megapixel
Phase One P30 back: 31 Megapixel
Phase One P25 back: 22 Megapixel
Canon 1Ds MKII with Canon Macro 100mm f/2.8: 16.6 Megapixel
Canon 5D with with Canon Macro 100mm f/2.8 : 12.7 Megapixel
Canon 1Ds with with Canon Macro 100mm f/2.8 : 11 Megapixels
Linhof 679cs camera with Rodenstock HR digital lenses: Various backs
Linhof 4X5 camera with Sironar HM lenses: Drum scanned film
Linhof 4X5 camera with Sironar N lenses and BetterLight Super 6K scanning back
Hasselblad H1 with Hasselblad H lenses: Various backs
Mamiya 645 with Mamiya lenses: P45 39 Megapixel and drum scanned Velvia