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On test: The Hasselblad H3DII-31

A digital Hasselblad for less than £10,000

By Ian Farrell

Time was when wedding and portrait photographers the world over shot with Hasselblad medium-format cameras. They were the best you could get in terms of picture quality and would see you through the length of your career. When digital photography came to the professional scene, though, social photographers were among the first to make the migration away from film and in the process abandoned medium format in favour of 35mm or APS-C based DSLRs which were smaller, faster and easier to use.
This revolution was accompanied by a change in the public’s taste for wedding and portrait photography. Formal posed pictures were losing out to a more candid style of picture taking. ‘Fly on the wall’ or ‘reportage’ were the buzzwords in wedding photography studios. Family portraiture moved from the studio to the beach with the advent of the lifestyle shoot. Whether these changes were brought about by social photographers moving over to cameras that were faster and easier to work with, or whether photographers just adapted to public demand is open to debate, but one thing is clear: Hasselblad got left behind.
Hasselblad did indeed enter the digital arena, but with products that were unashamedly expensive and aimed at the top-end commercial photographer with A-list clients, not wedding photographers shooting for the general public. The first two models in the H series were the H1 and H2, which were designed from the ground up to be fitted with digital backs – and not just Hasselblad backs either. Products from Phase One and Leaf gave photographers a great deal of choice and secured the reputation of the Hasselblad H-series camera as the professional workhorse.
In October 2007, though, a third H-series camera came along: the H3D. Described by Hasselblad as a ‘complete integrated digital camera’, the H3D (and its tweaked successor, the H3DII) effectively closed off the H-system to other manufacturers, meaning consumers didn’t have the choice of different digital backs any more. Hasselblad’s reasoning behind this has been that integration between lens, body and back was needed to improve picture quality further and improve handling.
So, where does this leave Hasselblad in 2008? The current H3DII is available in 31-, 39- and 50-megapixel versions, but selling this kind of camera to top-end photographers is not a volume game. Hence a move to claw back some of those once-loyal social photographers.
Most social portrait and wedding photographers would baulk at spending nearly £22,000 on a camera (the list price of a 50-megapixel Hasselblad H3DII-50), but thanks to a recent price drop it is now possible to break into the H-system with a 31-megapixel H3DII-31 and 80mm f/2.8 standard lens for a shade under ten grand. Hasselblad is pitting the H3DII-31 against the Canon EOS-1Ds MkIII, the Nikon D3 and other high-resolution professional DSLRs rumoured to be on the market.
Indeed, the H3DII-31 is the right H-system camera for a social photographer. Its resolution of 31-million pixels is more than enough for this type of work, and the sensitivity and speed of the sensor in this camera is greater than other H-series cameras, making it more versatile for location work. Also, a 31-million pixel camera gives a much more manageable file size than a 39- or 50-million pixel model, so you may not have to upgrade your computer.

Handling
Pick up the Hasselblad H3DII-31 from its beautifully engineered cardboard box and you will immediately notice the ergonomics of the camera. It sits in the hand very well, not like the Hasselblads of old that were really much more at home on a tripod. Supplied in the box are: an H3DII camera body fitted with a 31-megapixel back (although ‘integrated’ these two components are still detachable for cleaning and upgrade reasons); an 80mm f/2.8 CFE lens; two battery grips (one rechargeable and one emergency grip that takes three CR123 batteries for 30 minutes of operation); a FireWire cable for tethered shooting; and CDs containing Hasselblad’s Phocus software and instruction manuals.
The camera’s battery needs charging for 24 hours prior to first using the camera, but once this is done the grip attaches directly to the side of the camera – making it easy to swap batteries. The main functions of the digital back are carried out on the large screen on its rear, but there is also a small LCD screen on the top-plate that shows more camera-based information: exposure mode, shutter speed, aperture, ISO and the like. In previous H-system cameras these displays were distinct and separate, but the more integrated approach of the H3DII-31 means that there is now some overlap. For instance, when you take a picture with the camera, the histogram is displayed momentarily on the top-plate screen as well as being visible on the back, if desired. Two small control dials affect parameters like aperture, shutter speed and exposure compensation, with simultaneous button presses allowing them to change mode, metering and so on. All sounds very 21st century, but those used to 35mm-based Digital SLRs should be warned that the level of user friendliness of the H3DII-31 is still not quite what you’d expect from your Canon or Nikon. It’s the little things that niggle: try to apply some exposure compensation and you have to bring the camera away from your eye to find the right dial. As you turn this dial, you realise that ± value is not shown on the top-plate LCD, but in the viewfinder. I could go on, but this all sounds a bit petty. People were taking brilliant images with Hasselblads long before exposure compensation was even invented, so let’s set aside the ‘blad’s design difficulties for now.
The H3DII-31 has everything you really need, although it lacks one or two luxuries that photographers do tend to take for granted these days. Autofocus is limited to just one focus point, for instance. On the bright side, flash synch up to the camera’s max shutter speed of 1/800sec is possible with any flash gear thanks to the leaf shutters built into each lens.
The back itself is home to a clear, bright three-inch screen, which is of good, if not remarkable, quality. Digital backs are actually not very complicated things from a user’s point of view; they don’t actually do much except capture Raw files. The H3DII-31 back isn’t festooned with controls, and the menu system is easy enough to navigate around. Just the right balance we’d say.
Inside the back is a Kodak-made 44.2x33.1mm, 31-megapixel, 16-bit sensor. This is slightly smaller than the sensors used in the 39- and 50-megapixel H3DII models, which leads to a 1.3x focal length multiplication factor with the HC or HCD lenses in the Hasselblad range. This does mean the camera can operate at a slightly faster frame rate (of 1.2sec per frame), and its sensor is still 69 per cent larger than a 35mm frame.

Performance
As a general rule, digital backs don’t make JPEGs, they produce Raw files. The idea is to squeeze every last drop of image quality from the machine; spending £10,000 to do this and then capture images in a lossy compressed format would be daft. Hence, users of the
H3DII-31 will need to use the bundled Phocus software to convert their pictures to TIFFs or JPEGs. When you do this and take the resulting image into Photoshop for a closer look, you can instantly see why so many people make such a fuss about medium format.
Images from the H3DII-31 are incredibly sharp and are full of detail. Colours are as natural or as unnatural as you want them to be (this is something you control in Phocus), but the 16-bit sensor gives you so much latitude that you can really create anything you like. Most professional 35mm-based DSLRs have 14-bit sensors these days, but the Hasselblad’s extra two bits give more dynamic range and mean that the H3DII-31 is a forgiving camera when it comes to exposure.
Bearing in mind that 31-million pixels is the entry-level end of medium-format digital these days (resolutions currently top out at 60-megapixel), the H3DII-31 is still capable of producing 8-bit images of 90MB. In other words a 41x55cm image at 300dpi. And if you bear in mind that you can get away with printing down to 200dpi on most decent inkjet printers, you are looking at a maximum print size of 82.5x62cm. Impressive stuff.
Now you may be thinking ‘well, that’s just overkill. My clients never buy prints that big’. Well, that’s true, but the size advantage does also mean you have many more pixels to work with. It is harder to ‘break’ a digital image from the H3DII-31 in post production than it was from, say, a Nikon D3. And then there’s cropping: you can pull out a central piece of detail from an H3DII-31 image and it’s still easily big enough to give you a top-quality A3+ print. Hasselblad says you are investing in great image quality when you buy an H-system camera, and based on what we’ve seen on this test, we have little reason to doubt them.

* In the November issue: Award-winning social photographer Mark Ashworth puts the H3DII-31 through our exclusive field test.