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907x 50c now available

Godfrey

Well-known member
I know what you mean and I don‘t imply that you are doing anything wrong. I just realize that their suggested way of working with the camera is a very little known fact about the V system in general.

My point is just, coming from the Hasselblad instructions for the 500 series, how would it extrapolate to the use of the shift button? Since in the old design, there was no control element present in that spot on the lateral side. What do you think?

I‘d really be interested in mastering the ergonomics of the standalone 907X.
In over 25 years, I had never before read that portion of the 500CM manual... :D

As I said previously: Cradle the 907x sans Control Grip with the left hand to support and stabilize it. To work the control dial, rotate it with the right hand index finger in either direction. To work the shift-control dial function, press the button with your thumb and rotate the control dial with your index finger. Release the shutter with the right-hand index finger. BTW: There's an option in the preferences to let the control dial setting (for EV Compensation) reset after an exposure or stick through multiple exposures. I use the latter setting, because I tend to use the same setting for a couple of exposures at a time.

In my opinion, the best setup for a 907x sans Control Grip has a 'simple grip' tightly fitted on the left side of the camera and angled to allow a natural position of the left hand with the LCD deployed to 45° or 90° for waist level operation. I'm still making my 'simple grip'...

G
 

sog1927

Member
I have the 500CM/SWC manual right here, and I see their instructions for the left hand grip. Sorry, but the camera is MUCH less stable in my hands when I try to combine supporting the camera with releasing the shutter in just the one hand, and working the focus, exposure, and winding on is very awkward the way they suggest placing your hands. Whatever works for you is fine by me, just don't suggest that's how I do it... :)

I'd never read their instructions on holding the camera before. I bought my first 500CM about 25 years ago and just handle it as my hands tell me is stable and comfortable.

Speaking of holding the camera, I did my first walk with the 907x using the control grip and OVF. I walked for about two miles with it, fitted with the XCD 21mm, and made a good number of exposures. The grip and OVF make it feel quite a lot larger in the hands, but they do make it much more stable for casual shooting and framing. It's like working with a completely different camera in many ways.

G
I suspect my preference for holding it the other way might be due to my left-handedness. It's not like it's a religious issue or anything, it just felt better that way to me.
 

Tim Floyd

Active member
Interesting "review" by Kai where he starts out clearly knowing nothing about the camera (not even model number) but by the end of the video is smitten with it. I don't normally like these kind of videos but this one really brought out some of the strengths of the camera.
 

spb

Well-known member
Staff member
I cannot call that a review, I do not care for his jokey deliveries. I do agree that he did at least show some of the strengths of the camera.

This is a much more professional and informative review: Sonder Creative here we get to see the Grip, Viewfinder and flash in action.
 
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elm

Member
Do all of you use the two SD card slots on the CFVII 50c and how are you assigning what to do with the second SD? Are you all using the same capacity in both? Any advice? Thank you in advance.
 

FloatingLens

Well-known member
Do all of you use the two SD card slots on the CFVII 50c and how are you assigning what to do with the second SD? Are you all using the same capacity in both? Any advice? Thank you in advance.
Keep in mind that the CFV II 50C becomes really slow if it is not equipped with a UHS-II card (implies you are going to use RAW data). Files are massive at a combined 120MB for RAW+JPG per frame. This easily tops out the fastest SD cards with around 300MB/s write speed at three frames per second! If you have slower cards, you have to wait much longer for all read or write operations to finish; preview of files at full resolution is also affected.

I am not a professional shooter, so I have my 2 cards in overflow mode, with an old 8GB card as backup whenever the main 32GB card isn't installed. Coming from the 500C/M, I am also not in the habit of shooting lots of frames per session, so the small capacity is fine for my use.
 
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Godfrey

Well-known member
I have not had reason to use two cards loaded simultaneously yet. I generally use 64 and 128 G capacity cards, and capture raw files only. The files average 106 MB apiece, a 128 G card should be able to capture something on the order of 1200 exposures before becoming full and I only very rarely make more than 50-100 exposures in a session.

So if I were to use the second card slot, my goal would likely be for it to do duty as a backup. I'll likely never make 1200 plus exposures in any session I'm going to do. I'd likely put two of the same cards into the slots if I were to do that ... Less confusion, etc. :)

BTW: None of my cards (from an ancient 40MB/s Sandisk Ultra to my fastest 250MB/s Lexar Pro 1667x UHS II) ever brings up the "slow card" warning, and all of them work just fine for any amount of single frame still capture work that I've done. All of them write within the time it takes me to be ready for the next shot. Any SDHC/SDXC card in the Sandisk Extreme PRO speed class nowadays should work just fine, and lots of slower cards will too; you don't necessarily need the expensive UHS-II class cards for most things.

G
 
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docholliday

Well-known member
So if I were to use the second card slot, my goal would likely be for it to do duty as a backup. I'll likely never make 1200 plus exposures in any session I'm going to do. I'd likely put two of the same cards into the slots if I were to do that ... Less confusion, etc. :)

G
Usually, it's best to NOT have the same brand and batch for cards, especially when using them for redundancy purposes. I had a set of 4 Sandisk Pro 128GB CF cards that all had problems within a short period. Two were in use at a time, and the others were backup. I also had 4 Lexar 1066x 128GB cards. I had put the 1 of the Sandisks in slot 1 and a Lexar in slot 2 in a pair of 1Dx bodies. When the first Sandisk went down, it had controller problems and started hanging the CF interface. I simply shut off card 1 and went on shooting. On the second body a few days later, shooting went fine, but the card produced corrupted files on download. I pulled the Lexar and dumped it instead without issue. If I'd had the same cards in the body, I'd been hosed. Extended stress testing on the remaining two cards resulted in errors from them. Sandisk replaced all 4 cards and things have been good since. I also had the same type of issue with a pair of 32GB Transcend cards back in the day.

In most of my SAS raid clusters, I tend to mix 4 of one brand with 4 of another for the RAID build. I've had issues on servers where one drive would die and another of the same brand/batch would die during rebuild. RAID 60 can tolerate more than drive dead, but not more than two and rebuilds are the most critical time + stress for drives. Staggering the disks with different manufacturers has prevented the same failure from requiring the slow-as-molasses restore from tape (the last-in-line backup).

Also, solid state memory controllers (mostly) have a write-leveling algorithm to reduce write cycle wear. Filling up a smaller card wears out the card faster and is more prone to errors. It's best to use larger cards and write less to them when wanting to get the best reliability and longevity out of them. There's a lot of boxes I've had to work on where somebody thought they'd be cheap and by the smallest SSD they could find, but then wonder why the drive died prematurely because they had the drive filled > 75% capacity. Though I'm using 128GB cards in the 1Dx bodies, I rarely get more than 32GB or so of images on them before dumping. And that's only when I've been out for multiple days without access to a computer or power.
 
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Godfrey

Well-known member
I can't say anything plus or minus to your experience, docholiday. However, my experience over about 17 years and over three-quarters of a million exposures with SD cards is that I have never had any cards become unusable at all. I've had the occasional file or access glitch: I've always been able to retrieve all my work and reformat the card. I have every SD card I've ever purchased, all the way back to 2003/2004, and all of them are still 100% functional and usable (albeit many of the older ones are too small a capacity to be useful for 50 Mpixel cameras).

I've never done anything special with the cards.. always bought in doubles or quartets of the same product and just put them to work. I've always bought Sandisk and other quality name brands from reliable sources. As a result, I really and truly do not worry one bit about the cards at all. They just commodities to me. ;)

G
 
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docholliday

Well-known member
I can't say anything plus or minus to your experience, docholiday. However, my experience over about 17 years and over three-quarters of a million exposures with SD cards is that I have never had any cards become unusable at all. I've had the occasional file or access glitch: I've always been able to retrieve all my work and reformat the card. I have every SD card I've ever purchased, all the way back to 2003/2004, and all of them are still 100% functional and usable (albeit many of the older ones are too small a capacity to be useful for 50 Mpixel cameras).

I've never done anything special with the cards.. always bought in doubles or quartets of the same product and just put them to work. I've always bought Sandisk and other quality name brands from reliable sources. As a result, I really and truly do not worry one bit about the cards at all. They just commodities to me. ;)

G
My post wasn't really about the reliability of the cards, although I've had dozens of cards fail starting way back in 2000 with the MicroDrives and early CF. Most of those were in embedded appliances, routers, and industrial CNC applications. I have had a share of cards die throughout the years of hard use in 1D cameras. I've never had anything that used SD other than a few oscilloscopes and FLAC players. I've spent dozens of hours doing nothing but RMA'ing card media, SSDs, HDDs, and RAM.

My post was about the concept in computing of (not) relying on (and trusting) a single manufacturer and batch when requiring redundancy and reliability, just like the old wisdom of never shooting a wedding on a 70mm back. One mistake and you've lost a whole event whereas shooting on A12 or A24 gave you better odds of salvaging enough to still constructively finish the job. I was one of those who took the effort and time to file unique notches into every A12, A24, and E12 back so if I had a light leak or mis-spacing, I knew exactly which back it came from. (y)
 
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cgastelum

Member
So my 907x /CFV50 is in Hasselblad's hospital this week. in the meantime this new member of the family has been keeping me company. (it is quite a step up from my rusty old 500c)
By the way, the DAL-1 L bracket and the small rig wooden handle look good on this setup too.

IMG_3127.jpg
 

spb

Well-known member
Staff member
I can't say anything plus or minus to your experience, docholiday. However, my experience over about 17 years and over three-quarters of a million exposures with SD cards is that I have never had any cards become unusable at all. I've had the occasional file or access glitch: I've always been able to retrieve all my work and reformat the card. I have every SD card I've ever purchased, all the way back to 2003/2004, and all of them are still 100% functional and usable (albeit many of the older ones are too small a capacity to be useful for 50 Mpixel cameras).

I've never done anything special with the cards.. always bought in doubles or quartets of the same product and just put them to work. I've always bought Sandisk and other quality name brands from reliable sources. As a result, I really and truly do not worry one bit about the cards at all. They just commodities to me. ;)

G
My experience is much the same, out of who knows how many cards, I have had one failure. I used to use Sandisk. Since about 2 years I use Lexar and Angelbird UHS II cards. No issues.
 

jotloob

Subscriber Member
So my 907x /CFV50 is in Hasselblad's hospital this week. in the meantime this new member of the family has been keeping me company. (it is quite a step up from my rusty old 500c)
By the way, the DAL-1 L bracket and the small rig wooden handle look good on this setup too.

View attachment 176891
Hello
Can you please tell , whats the cause for 907x/CFV50c sending for repair ? ? ?
Did you send it directly to HASSELBLAD in SWEDEN ? ? ?
 
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Godfrey

Well-known member
My post wasn't really about the reliability of the cards, although I've had dozens of cards fail starting way back in 2000 with the MicroDrives and early CF. Most of those were in embedded appliances, routers, and industrial CNC applications. I have had a share of cards die throughout the years of hard use in 1D cameras. I've never had anything that used SD other than a few oscilloscopes and FLAC players. I've spent dozens of hours doing nothing but RMA'ing card media, SSDs, HDDs, and RAM.

My post was about the concept in computing of (not) relying on (and trusting) a single manufacturer and batch when requiring redundancy and reliability, just like the old wisdom of never shooting a wedding on a 70mm back. One mistake and you've lost a whole event whereas shooting on A12 or A24 gave you better odds of salvaging enough to still constructively finish the job. I was one of those who took the effort and time to file unique notches into every A12, A24, and E12 back so if I had a light leak or mis-spacing, I knew exactly which back it came from. (y)
Well, isn't that about "the reliability of the cards" and your trust in a manufacturer's products? ;)

Since I've nearly always used cameras with just one card slot, and usually just use one card even with my cameras that have two, and never had ANY issues with two cards purchased at the same time from the same vendor from the same manufacturer, etc etc ... I'm just not going to get terribly worried about it.

I'm no longer taking photograph jobs for pay, so that does influence my thinking about this stuff now. When I was taking jobs for pay, I always had backup with me for every job. It's just not an issue now ... If the equipment goes belly up in the middle of a session, I just plan to do something else. LOL! :D
 
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cgastelum

Member
Hello
Can you please tell , whats the cause for 907x/CFV50c sending for repair ? ? ?
Did you send it directly to HASSELBLAD in SWEDEN ? ? ?
My CFVII back was having issues, every now and then, detecting the 907x body, and sometimes the body was having trouble detecting the lens. I bought my camera from CI and Steve H. has been great taking care of the issue and dealing with Hasselblad directly. Now I just have to wait to get it back, hopefully soon because I have a couple of hikes planned in upstate NY and would love to have the camera back for those.
 

bythewei

Active member
I'm a little embarrassed to ask. Do you need an external sync cable to mount the CFVII50C on a 500 body?

Elsewhere, some said yes and others said no. I'm confused.
 

FloatingLens

Well-known member
I'm a little embarrassed to ask. Do you need an external sync cable to mount the CFVII50C on a 500 body?

Elsewhere, some said yes and others said no. I'm confused.
Works without cable. But the duration the back takes for the exposure depends on how long you depress the shutter button.
 

Godfrey

Well-known member
...
I reported the lack of functionality of the DoF Preview function on the Control Grip to Hasselblad USA customer service. The tech there tested and found the same on his camera, so a note has been sent off to Hasselblad engineering in Sweden to see if there's something about using this function we don't know or if this is a bug/unimplemented feature. It seems to me assuredly a bug...
I received a note back from Hasselblad to the effect that this issue will be addressed in a future firmware update. My interpretation: "Yes, a bug ... Thanks for reporting it, it's on the list to fix." :D

G
 

Godfrey

Well-known member
I'm a little embarrassed to ask. Do you need an external sync cable to mount the CFVII50C on a 500 body?
Elsewhere, some said yes and others said no. I'm confused.
Works without cable. But the duration the back takes for the exposure depends on how long you depress the shutter button.
You don't need an external sync cable to use the CFVII 50c on most Hasselblad 500 bodies for normal operation. You do need a special cable connection for the 503CW(?) with motor winder and all the EL bodies to trigger the motorized transport mechanism to operate.

How long you have to depress the shutter button always follows the same rule: Because the Hasselblad 500 series' rear shutter that protects the film gate is mechanically operated and dependent upon the body shutter release, you must keep the shutter release button depressed for the entire length of an exposure or the rear shutter will close prematurely and shorten the exposure. The same is true whether you're using the lens shutter or the eshutter, but of course in the case of the latter on a Hasselblad SLR body, you've set the shutter on B and locked the shutter button to raise the mirror, open the rear shutter, open the lens shutter, and stop down the lens in order for Live View and the electronic shutter operation to work anyway, unless you're just holding down the shutter release only when you want to focus, frame, and expose a shot.

(Not having owned or used any of the EL series bodies or the 503CW model with a winder, I do know they have a specific "continuous sequence" operating mode but don't know exactly how that works with respect to operation of the body shutter or whether there are limitations on the range of shutter speeds that can be used in the continuous mode.)

G
 
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