Big Performance, Tiny Camera :: the Hasselblad 907x 100 Megapixel CFV100
[Music] in this video we are going to take a first look at the allnew 100 megapixel Hasselblad 907x with the allnew cfv 100c back there are a lot of really nice upgrades to this camera now including the 100 megapixel backside illuminated sensor from the x2d we also now have phase detection autofocus as well as 1 tbte of internal SSD storage this is certainly one of the most unique cameras that you can currently find and if image quality is important to you this complements the x2d is one of the best cameras you can currently shoot with so welcome back everyone this is the brand new hosel blood 907x with the 100 megapixel back many of you may remember a couple years ago when the 50 megapixel version of this came out I did a review on that and I really was impressed with this camera it's one of the most unique unique form factors that you're going to find anywhere I actually bought one and I've been using it ever since and I absolutely love this camera particularly in a studio environment we'll get into use cases in a bit but I want to talk about what's new in the 100 megapixel version so this camera features the same 100 megapixel sensor that you find on the x2d that is currently I think one of the best sensors ever made it's backside illuminated you get up to 15 stops of dynamic range it delivers 16bit files it really is gorgeous it's amazing to work with and I can't think of any camera that gives you a better sensor and processor combination uh the hustle blood x2d just delivers and I have noticed in my time with the 907x with the 100 megapixel back that it is no different it is absolutely outstanding now I also mentioned one of the things that I love about this camera is the form factor so it certainly is a very vintage aesthetic it has a nod back to the original 500 cm cameras that hosel blood used to make and it follows that same direction you've got a chrome body with the leather Ed it looks really cool it is very different to shoot with and I think that's one of the things that I absolutely love about this it's so different than anything else on the market and I think that's what makes it really cool so the controls on this camera are fairly minimal we have one button that is your lens release and then on the other side we have a combination of a shutter release with a ring around it now the way this works depending on what mode you're in is you essentially have two functions from this ring so for instance if you're in manual mode the default is this ring will control the aperture now on the side of the camera there is a small button when I push this button it acts as an altern ative function for that ring so if I push and hold this button and then turn the ring it turns into my shutter speed and so this will change a little bit depending on what mode you're shooting in so for instance if you're in aperture priority it is Aperture and then with the secondary function button it becomes exposure compensation and the same with shutter priority where it's going to control the shutter speed so on so forth so it's a really cool way of being able to control the camera with very minimal dials on the body itself the back of the camera features a touchcreen and below that there are five physical buttons that will control various things things like turning on the camera going into image review mode being able to delete an image so on so forth everything else though is pretty much done on the back of the camera as a touchscreen now I also want to mention that this is probably one of my favorite user interfaces of any camera system the whole thing is touchbased it's also icon based so it's got an incredibly awesome UI and just to give you an overview when you boot up the camera it's going to default into live view you do have some touch control over here so for instance on the top left I can select my white balance if I go over on the top right I can select the is setting that I want to use now there are some other modes that you can get into and you can use the physical buttons but the easiest way to do this is you can swipe down and this will get you into the function menu I can select aperture shutter speed on the top row you're going to see white balance as we saw before there's also autofocus modes I can select between autofocus and manual focus and then also new on this camera because we now have phase detection autofocus we have face detection autofocus as well and so if I click this little icon here I have three selections I can go between Auto manual or I can turn it off when it is on what it will do is it will detect faces in the scene that's where the autofocus priority will be and so what it does is it draws a little green box around the face one thing I mention is alongside the x2d in my experience with this even though it's not eye detection autofocus it is putting an emphasis on the eyes and it is recognizing faces with an eye priority when you are shooting so that's one thing to consider even though you're not seeing it in the UI that's the experience that I'm having with this I have not had no focus problems at all especially when shooting portraits on the bottom row I've got exposure mode and we've got the conventional manual aperture shutter or program priority modes next to that we have the metering method so you can choose between Center weighted spot or even Center spot metering we've got drive mode selection and this camera will do both exposure bracketing as well as Focus bracketing which is very cool now if I want to dig deeper into the customization of this camera there is a second page here and so if I swipe to the left you're going to get that second page everything is icon based so if I have something I'm looking for it's really easy to find they have had this icon based System since the original x1de it's on the age cameras also this is one of my favorites ever because it makes everything really easy to find they've simplified it over the years and I think along with the x2d this is the same menu system it is absolutely incredible on the right side of the camera we have a door that opens which will reveal the battery and also your CF Express card slot this camera did move up from using SD cards the other thing worth pointing out here is that it is a one slot design but the camera does have one tbyte of internal SSD storage one of the things that I love about this is first of all if you are like me and you're one of the people who forgets to take their card out of the reader and put it back into the camera sometimes you're covered because you have a backup of external storage the truth is is I actually never take the card out of the camera cuz I will plug this in using the high-speed USB port over here and as long as you're using the right cable on here and it supports the data transfer speeds this is the fastest way to get a lot of high megapixel images off of your camera and onto your computer and I want to say that there are only two cameras in existence right now that are using internal SSD store storage this is something that every manufacturer should be doing right now now on the bottom of the camera next to where you see the tripod socket connections you're also going to see the connection Port that is going to connect to the optional grip and what's really cool about this just screws in with a small thumb screw here and once I have that set you've got a control grip which is going to give you more support to the camera and also this gives you more functionality in terms of physical buttons this is actually something that I highly recommend for this camera because I love the Simplicity and I love the option of being able just to use the camera on its own but the optional grip is going to give you more control over autofocus points so for instance if you want to use the joystick to move the autofocus Point around if you want to do things like be able to pull up the menus really quickly or a lot of times I will keep this in manual focus and I set it up for back button autofocus the only way to do that is with the optional control grip and it does give you some more functionality too you get two physical dials here and the joystick also pushes in for another custom functionality it's really well thought out and I think that even though it comes as an option to this this camera I think it's something that I would highly recommend if you want to get into this system on the back of the camera you also have this small door that comes down and underneath you're going to find your flash connections as well as your remote release connection hos blad make a remote release for this camera which is something that's very cool and if you have this on a tripod you're doing long exposure and you want to do remote release previously with the x2d the only way to do that is by using the app and which is very good but if you want to do it with a physical connection you can actually get that exposure release and plug it in there I want to talk about Flash for second because there's something very new on this camera and I think this is a good time to mention the modular concept that we have here so to illustrate this is probably a good time to bring out one of my old film hustel blad so this is my old 503cx I love this camera the cool thing about hustel blad with these early designs is they were completely modular and what I mean by that is the uh camera is here you've got the lens you've got the camera body with the viewfinder there's a mirror inside so I can focus using the viewfinder and then finally you've got the backs now the backs are removable so if I just basically slide this over I can take the back off now why would you want to change the backs in and out well let's say you're in a studio situation and I have this mounted to a tripod I can simply change the backs in and out very easily without having to disturb the setup and so that's one thing that's really cool especially back in the film days where you basically got 12 shots to a back there is a 24 shot back but still it's fairly limited also you can actually take the film off of the camera and replace it with a different film type let's say you have two or three of these backs I have one with color film that's slide film I have one that's c41 and then I have another that's black and white so I can change these in and out as I go it also offered different options for different viewfinders I can actually take this viewfinder out it becomes modular obviously most people are familiar with the concept of being able to change the lens out but this lets you change various items on the camera itself out and it's very cool now hos blood have brought that over with the 907x concept as well so it's similar to the film camera except we don't have a mirrorbox in here and we have a digital back instead of a film back but you're going to see the release button on the top there just as as it is on my older camera and so if I push this in and slide it to the right I can actually take the back and separate it from the body of the camera this is crazy Talk Ted why on Earth would you want to do that well the first thing we can do is we can actually Mount up the new hot shoe that hos blot has designed to go with this camera so if you want to shoot flash photography and you don't want to use the little small inputs you want a more traditional hot shoe this one does ship with a hot shoe that you can put in so there's a little cover over here and you're going to slide this off you can see the connection Port down here and you're going to actually slide in the hot shoe assembly and then you're going to put the camera back together and now we have a camera with a hot shoe on the top now another thing that I can do is I can take my film camera and I'm going to remove the film back on here and I'm going to replace it with the digital back 100 megapixels and it mounts to the film body here and I now have a digital 503cx so this is really cool now obviously a couple things you need to know about this we've got the digital back mounted on here and there's a certain way that we're going to use this it is not a Square format sensor and it is definitely not as big as the film area was with medium format film now this camera does come with a little mask that you can drop in so you know where your crop areas are but it works really well what I love about this it's come a long way since hust BLS first started doing this on the 50 megapixel version of this camera but essentially it does recognize the camera body I have this already set up if you're using a different hustle blood body and you want to note that what I'm going to do is just slide over to the secondary menu here and you can click on camera body and there is a little drop down menu and you can select what it is that you're using there and I'm pretty much good to go so we're going to go back over to the first menu basically the only control I have on the actual back now is going to be the live view I can turn that on or off and so if you just want to preview the scene get your focus situated and all that you can go in there but everything else is going to be controlled from the camera so really it does not change the experience from shooting with a film camera now I just have a digital back it is very cool now there are some other things that this back is very useful for as well so hos blood do sell adapters and with the appropriate adapters you can use the H series lenses for instance so all of the HC or hcd lenses and you can also adapt all of the xand series lenses so if you're not familiar with xan xan was a camera that hosel blood made years ago that essentially used a 35mm film but it would project the medium format image Circle onto it so you had this extreme Panorama so this was really fun to do with either vertical or horizontal images and it's also built into the crop mode so even if you're not using the lenses you can access that so if I go into the settings I'm going to tap crop modes and I tap here to get my drop- down selection and I'm going to select xan and we are set this is one of my favorite modes on this camera it is very interesting in terms of what you can do with composition I have had a lot of fun with this you can also do this with the x2d it's been on the previous versions of these cameras and if you have the xand lenses you can certainly use those as well it adds a lot of functionality and a lot of variety as to what you can do with this camera oh and one other use case is essentially you saw me connect this back to the film camera as long as you'd have an adapter for the back there are a wide range of technical cameras that are designed for me medium format that you could use this back with you could technically also use it with a large format as long as you had a mask with the correct adapter for the back so there's a lot that you can do with this and I think this is one thing that differentiates the 907x from the x2d among other things but it's the ability to adapt this to pretty much the entire history of every camera hos has ever made but this is really cool because you can think of the 907x if you think of the x2d as like a machete this is your Swiss army knife so are there any downsides to the 907 X well really there are two that I can think of so the first one is is there is no electronic viewfinder in this camera everything is done from the rear screen this could be a problem if you shoot a lot in bright sunlight if you're the type of shooter who goes out during the day it's going to be a little bit difficult when you're dealing with Reflections and bright light coming from the Sun now I haven't had too much of a problem with this I find that the screen is really bright I also tend to shoot in more diffused lighting shade uh lower lighting conditions and so I don't really shoot a lot in bright sunlight but if you do I think that's a reason why why you would probably consider the x2d over the 907x because it does have probably one of the best evfsnyx0ecm stabilization they did not add this into this camera so it is unstabilized you're going to have to use a tripod for slower shutter speed settings again if you're the type of photographer who wants to shoot in low light and you want to be able to have access to inbody image stabilization you're going to have to look at the x2d it has some of the best inbody image stabilization I've used on anything so it is definitely uh the way to go if that is a requirement for you but just note that it's not on the 907x now as far as alternatives for the 907x I can't really think of any other than possibly the x2d now the x2d is a more tradition camera design it's going to function like pretty much every camera that you're used to out there and that's one of the things that I love about the 907x you have this modular formula that you can highly customize and the form factor is so cool and it's so small it plays into hosel blots history it's one of the few companies that can actually do that and I think it's so awesome from that perspective one of the things that I mentioned with the start of this video is I actually prefer to use this as a studio camera now normally you think of a studio camera as being able to use something that's really large or even maybe even bigger than this film camera and long lenses things that you want to be able to use in a studio that you don't necessarily want to drag around and shoot in the field with or go on location with but one of the things that I love about this is it is so small and so compact I like having it as a studio camera because it doesn't take up any space it's really awesome for that the only reason that I don't go out a little more with this is like I said I like to shoot in a lot of lower lighting conditions and the lack of Ibis is a little bit of an issue on that but uh if you were willing to use a tripod it certainly has that flexibility too I think this camera is actually really awesome for things like street photography for architecture where I really don't need a tripod if I've got enough light it has a lot of Versatility to it and that's one of the things that I absolutely love about this I also want to say that hos blot has come a long way with their lenses in the last couple years for the xcd system the early lenses were all optically excellent and I've enjoyed using a lot of them I've owned several of them but the new V lenses have taken this up another level so not only do we have like physical controls rings on the actual lenses we have a much nicer design they're lighter weight they're much faster in terms of autofocus Motors so we have the original lens Optical quality but we have now some things that make them very useful of course any xcd lens will work with these and I've had a ton of fun shooting on this I will do some more videos on the 907x but I would love to know what you think drop me a comment below if there's anything you would like me to cover in those and I will catch you guys in the next video Until then later
