The GetDPI Photography Forum

Great to see you here. Join our insightful photographic forum today and start tapping into a huge wealth of photographic knowledge. Completing our simple registration process will allow you to gain access to exclusive content, add your own topics and posts, share your work and connect with other members through your own private inbox! And don’t forget to say hi!

Dicomed Bigshot

photo570

Member
Hi all,
I know someone who has a Dicomed Bigshot 4000, they haven't used it for ages (Years in fact) but apparently it is in perfect working order. Now I know it is old, but I shoot almost daily with a Leaf CantareXY, so I can handle legacy stuff. I also have a Valeo17, and an AptusII5, but the Bigshot has always intrigued me and I remember that it has popped up now and then on the forums, with at-least two people mentioning they used to have one. I am thinking of using it for personal projects, so no huge production pressure, I guess my question is; Will the huge chip size be worth the hassle? Is there a huge hassle, or is it just a case of stepping back in time and working a bit slower,like we used to?

Any replies appreciated,

Cheers
 
M

mrebay

Guest
:watch::bugeyes::bugeyes:could you tell me how much he wants for it thanks
 

Thierry

New member
The OP posted this more than 1 year ago!

In any case, I did never see the Bigshot working without flaw. I had one in our studios at Sinar, from the first serie, but then Dicomed stopped the production/research for it and it disappeared.

Thierry

:watch::bugeyes::bugeyes:could you tell me how much he wants for it thanks
 

Stefan Steib

Active member
Not to forget the necessary Jack hammer SCSI3 card with the maximum 1,5m long cable and the extensions for MacOS(NO OSX SUPPORT!!!) that would load or not, making using it a lottery.
This was no fun to use, it´s good this is history, I would not give a recommendation to anybody to use this today, maybe for historical research if you have a complete setup, but would you like to beam yourself back to 1996 ?
We used this for about a year but then could give it back - fortunately !!!

Regards
Stefan
 

Quentin_Bargate

Well-known member
Dicomed were ahead of the curve with both the Bigshot and their scanning backs. Pity they went bust (Betterlight of course taking over their scanning backs and developing them - the original; Dicomed field pro was flaky but awesome). It would be fun to play around with a Bigshot, but who offers support for them now? I suggest borrowing it for few days to see how it works.
 

epatsellis

New member
Mike Collette @ Betterlight still offers support for Dicomed backs. My FieldPro still works just fine. I'd love to get a Betterlight 6K, but two things dissuade me:

1: My Dicomed still works just as good as new.
2: The cost/return ratio on even a used 6K doesn't make business sense.
 

EH21

Member
wow! I would love to see a sample image taken with one of these. I love the square format and would be curious to know what the DR of this thing must be. Am I doing the math right that the sensor pitch is 15 um?
 

epatsellis

New member
The actual capture area is 7x10 cm, with a resolution of 6,000 x 7200. I have a sample on my flicker stream (greatly reduced resolution, of course) and a 100% cropped sample.
The original file is around 125 mb....



and the 100% cropped area (marked in red)

(shot was taken with an 80mm Rodagon on a Sinar P)

Of course you can crop square, I use a self built adapter to use the back on my RB with a 6,000 x 6,000 resolution.

The big advantage to a scan back is that there is no Bayer Pattern sensor, so you get the actual RGB value for each sensor pixel, the equivalent resolution is claimed to be 135mp, and having upsampled some of the images I have shot, I'm inclined to believe it, at 2x it's still sharper and more detailed than any Bayer Pattern sensor I've ever used.
 
Top