I think this may be true to some extent ... there are most certainly applications that once required MS, that the bigger 80 and even 60 backs can now handle adequately. Jumping from 39 meg to 60 and 80 meg was a decent leap forward in resolution. I tested my H4D/60 against my old CF/39MS and the 60 did an adequate enough job to make the swap ... but the color from the MS was better right out of the camera. So, it was not as big a leap forward in color fidelity and rendering of minute patterns that can produce moiré because it still uses the same basic method of capture ... just more of it. Tweaked of course, but still basically the same. I'm absolutely sure a 6 shot 50 back will murder anything available in single shot made by anyone.
The notion that MS is complex and fraught with technical difficulties is either marketing speak from companies that do not offer MS, or folks that haven't actually used it day-in and day-out. It is a no-brainer work flow, and once all is refined using single shot, you just click the MS button and it does it's thing ... in mere seconds. The pic comes up and ... WOW! As many experienced MS shooters have mentioned, working on MS shots is MUCH easier than single shot and the retouching time is cut way down per shot. I really found that to be true for a client I did work for last year. I don't do as much of that now that I'm semi-retired so it doesn't matter as much now.
-Marc
Marc (and David), this is not a pissing contest and perhaps we should start a separate MS Vs Single thread
So far I have yet to see a 6 shot file that looks better than a scaled-up 5 shot one or better than a single shot 80MP file in terms of resolution and colour. Let me re-phrase that: I have yet to see a new customer that was presented with the 3 options and chose MS. The large number of MS products we get as trade-in nowadays supports my general view of this market.
Facts are that a multi shot solution will wear your shutters 5-6 or even 8 times faster (you said "and once all is refined using single shot, you just click the MS button")
To put some real numbers down; there are repro houses that do 3,000-3,500 separate documents/ pages each day on each camera. Assuming that your average MF shutter can last 100K clicks, you are going through 1-2 shutters every month or two. You cannot afford any downtime so you have to invest in 2 bodies or 2 lenses per station depending on your setup. It gets a little better if you use Schneider electronic shutters as they last longer but only if 1/60th is fast enough for your applications
On a decent Mac/ PC, from shutter release to 100% render with an MS camera is ALLOT slower than with a single shot camera. If your work requires hundreds or even thousands of frames every day it all adds up to many many man hours that either you don't have or that you are not getting money for...
Then we get to file sizes and storage, and the IT requirements that come with it. A single shot 80MP RAW file is 3 to 13 (!) times
smaller than a 50MP MS RAW file. Do the math and see how much longer it takes to transfer 100 MS images to a server or to write them to tape...again this is time and money!
So if you are managing a digitisation project and your government or the organisation that funds the project specifies a budget and a deadline for finishing the project, or if you run a repro house, which way will YOU go?
Regarding colour accuracy. In theory there is only ONE way to capture true colour but this requires a monochrome chip and big colour filters and it is only useable for still (VERY still) objects. We've abandoned this technology (along with the Bayer based MS) years ago because we believed that in the long run single shot will replace it successfully, which it does if you go by sales figures.
Happy independence day BTW:salute: