Krosavcheg
Member
Sometimes the irony is hard to read in text.. So in all likelihood I missed it.I'm not sure if my irony came through, focusing does not become trickier for real of course. A digital back will not be more out of focus than a film back, it's just that when you open a digital image you have better ability to actually zoom in to 100% and see exactly where the focus sits.
How much a difference that makes in a print I don't actually know as I haven't made prints from film. Some may say that as digital renders sharper than film, you will still in a print have a need to have more precise focus with digital than film. I don't know if that is true though. There's probably others on this forum that has experience from that.
Personally I use a 20x loupe on the ground glass on my tech cam, and I never shoot wider than f/11. That way I get pixel peep safe results. Focusing accurately wide open with an RZ without loupe is too hard for me, film or not... but some folks have unreal precision in their manual focusing.
Of course the issue is subjective. I can not speak for sharpness and ideal focus with RZ because I mainly shoot handheld and on the go. All the scans are dry and at 4800dpi making it virtually impossible to be 100% convinced. For a test I did some shots WO with 110/2.8 and seems to be nailing those, yet again - handheld, high ISO film makes judgement less than ideal.
On the other hand I don't have much problem focusing with manual lenses on 5Dm3 even at f8-f11 (occasionally miss at 1.2-1.4, but I do so even with AF..) (touch wood)...
As it is, I see absolutely no practical application for an MFD considering multitude of issues many people including yourself outlined - blooming, colour cast, hot pixels, centrefold, problems with focusing, need for wake-up signal for Kodak and reduced exposure times for Dalsa..... Essentially, the whole photographic process becomes extremely cumbersome and tedious requiring a portable computer/tablet, shooting, checking focus, re-shooting, shooting LCC, correcting profiles in C1 (which annoyingly requires catalogue/collection creation and can't just process files from personally organised file structure).
All this comes at a steep price, so essentially all the "value" is rendered entirely non-existent by all the issues present. In a somewhat crude analogy, there is more value in a working Lada than an engine-less Bentley pulled by a horse..