Having used an MFDB for about a year (Sinar eMotion 75 / Hy6) and having read the various threads here (which confirm my observations), am I right to conclude that there is almost no point in using a medium format digital back on a typical medium format system for landscape photography?
The arguments:
(a) medium format digital inherently has more limited DoF than smaller sensors
(b) digital (any chip size) has a very steep fall-off of sharpness outside of the very thin plane of focus (compared to film), this is even more visible on the ultra sharp output from MFDBs
(c) stopping the lenses down beyond f8.0 to increase DoF is not really helpful since we start losing detail and contrast through diffraction; the lenses are not optimized for use fully stopped down
Now what puzzles me is that something like a Leica S2 is often pitched as the "landscape shooter's camera" and a lot of people, myself included, have gone into MFDB to achieve higher quality in landscape photography. But for the above reason, this would seem a bit pointless.
What confuses me even more is why the manufacturers all seem to offer fast lenses that are optimized for shooting wide open or near wide open. This may be great for the fashion shooters (the biggest market) but these lenses would seem far from ideal for landscape. And even for portrait photographs, I often find that I have to stop down to f5.6-8.0 (especially with something like a 180mm lens) to achieve acceptable range of sharpness (unless I want to always be "creative" and have everything unsharp except for the person's eyes - and frankly I often want also the nose and the ears sharp or at least not completely OOF).
So what are the solutions here for the landscape shooters trying to maximize DoF while using the performance of their digibacks to the full - is it using lenses originally designed for use with LF cameras and optimized for shooting at small apertures, like the Digitars, on something like an Alpa?
Or is there some way around these constraints with the more mainstream MF SLR systems?
In the light of the above arguments, is something like a Leica S2 really a landscape photographer's "dream camera" as we sometimes read here and on the other discussion fora?
The arguments:
(a) medium format digital inherently has more limited DoF than smaller sensors
(b) digital (any chip size) has a very steep fall-off of sharpness outside of the very thin plane of focus (compared to film), this is even more visible on the ultra sharp output from MFDBs
(c) stopping the lenses down beyond f8.0 to increase DoF is not really helpful since we start losing detail and contrast through diffraction; the lenses are not optimized for use fully stopped down
Now what puzzles me is that something like a Leica S2 is often pitched as the "landscape shooter's camera" and a lot of people, myself included, have gone into MFDB to achieve higher quality in landscape photography. But for the above reason, this would seem a bit pointless.
What confuses me even more is why the manufacturers all seem to offer fast lenses that are optimized for shooting wide open or near wide open. This may be great for the fashion shooters (the biggest market) but these lenses would seem far from ideal for landscape. And even for portrait photographs, I often find that I have to stop down to f5.6-8.0 (especially with something like a 180mm lens) to achieve acceptable range of sharpness (unless I want to always be "creative" and have everything unsharp except for the person's eyes - and frankly I often want also the nose and the ears sharp or at least not completely OOF).
So what are the solutions here for the landscape shooters trying to maximize DoF while using the performance of their digibacks to the full - is it using lenses originally designed for use with LF cameras and optimized for shooting at small apertures, like the Digitars, on something like an Alpa?
Or is there some way around these constraints with the more mainstream MF SLR systems?
In the light of the above arguments, is something like a Leica S2 really a landscape photographer's "dream camera" as we sometimes read here and on the other discussion fora?