Finally after much personal anticipation I have been able to shoot with a Phase One P25. Michael Reichmann of Luminous Landscape constructed a field report with a sort of pros and cons point of view towards the Canon 1DsMKII and the Phase One P25. He also owns both systems. However, me being one of those people who really needs to see something for themselves I decided to create my own field report. I second many of Mr. Reichmann's thoughts on the P25.

The week prior to Thanksgiving 2005 Chris Benes of Phase One visited me at work and dropped off a P25 Digital Back attached to a Hasselblad H1 body equiped with a Hasselblad 80mm f/2.8 prime lens. As some of you may know I am a Canon shooter, owner, and vocal supporter. Canon has produced in my mind the best 35mm Dslr to date in the Canon 1DsMKII. But, I'm a bigger supporter of using whatever tool you'd like to get the shot. I enjoy exploring different systems and new technology. I make a point of using new equipment when it becomes available.

First up let's talk about actually working with images from the P25. Capture One is Phase One's utility to process the RAW images taken from their digital backs. It is required to process the images. There is no support for say Adobe Camera Raw. This is bad news for me because Adobe Camera Raw is really part of my image processing pipeline. However, it's not a terribly big deal. It's just a matter of processing the basic color and sharpness in Capture One first then exporting a 16 bit .tif file. So essentially Capture One becomes my Adobe Camera Raw.

The program itself is pretty simple. Above are some screen captures of the menu system. It's tab based and visually easy to see where everything is. The Capture menu shows a histogram and lets you know if the program thinks your image is underexposed. The White Balance Menu is up next and is pretty nice to use. I like the color palette with hue and saturation controls. There is also feature in there to load saved Lens Color Cast Corrections. The Exposure menu lets you adjust the exposure, contrast, and saturation of the overall image. You are presented with levels and curves to work with as well. The Focus tab is really a cool idea for those who like sharpening at this stage in the game. There is a 100% view of a rectangular area of the current image (which you can choose). You then can adjust the amount of sharpening you'd like as well as correcting color noise and banding within the image. Last up is the Processing menu. Here you can specify all sorts of exporting features like images size, bit depth, and format. There are other features like stitching and a color editor embedded in the menu system, but I'll leave that out.

When you process images in Capture One they get queued up and are rendered out to a location you specify. This is nice because you can continue working on other images while this is happening in the background. This comes in handy as your are exporting 130mb files which take time to create and write to disk.

What's missing? Tons of things that I'm used to with Adobe Camera Raw and Adobe Bridge. Most noteable are vignetting controls, chromatic aberration adjustment, channel calibration, and shadow depth control. Besides that Adobe Bridge has some amazing quick proofing and batching controls that Capture One really doesn't have.

I would like to see Phase One work with Adobe to allow them to use the algorithms to process their Raw files in the future. I use Adobe Photoshop on almost every image I work with at it would be a real added bonus for me and other photographers not to have to deal with another software package.

Above you'll see an illustration of the differences in size between the Phase One P25 and the Canon 1DsMKII. I also made of note of marking off the different aspect ratio points between the two systems. The P25 captures a 4x3 aspect ratio and the 1DsII captures a 3x2 aspect ratio.

I make note of this for a reason. If you have ever been in a conversation with me or read my notes about compositional theory you may know why I like a 3x2 aspect ratio. First up human beings typically see more width than height, and the wider format of 3x2 simulates that to a point. Also, if you subscribe to the rule of thirds a 3x2 frame lends itself to being cut up easily in that regard. However, good composition can come from any type of frame (different shapes as well). It's just more difficult to achieve because it's not what the human eye is used to seeing. It's all a matter of understanding how subdivisional composition works and where to place your points of interest to lead the viewer.

Something that does rub me wrong here is something that I cherish with my 1DsII. 100% viewfinder coverage. I am really picky when it comes to my captured frame and the H1 + P25 combo doesn't exactly have the coverage I look for. Basically the H1 viewfinder sees "more" than the captured image area of the P25. This is a sensor limitation.

Everybody loves to compare actual resolution between systems. And I'll show that below, but I'd like to take a moment and say that at these pixel resolutions you're really more concerned about image sharpness rather than resolution.

I say this because the average photographer never prints above 8x10. I'm speaking in general terms, but you really don't need more then 6 megapixels for prints that big. Even then I have a few prints made off of a 6 megapixel camera that were printed out to 60x40 inches and they stand up just fine. For fine art and real print work the extra megapixels help, but our fascination with "more pixels makes it better" isn't a good rule to stick to. Why?

Well, there are many factors that come into play when producing a crisp image. For instance Canon has been critisized for their lenses not being up to snuff. I own 12 Canon lenses and disagree with that statement for the most part. Anything wider than 35mm they need to work on, but all of their other ranges have a lens that is very capable of producing a sharp image. What people are seeing at these pixel resolutions is Canon's AA (anit-aliasing) Filter coming into play. However, through simple sharpening techniques you can produce a pretty nice and sharp image.

That being said, the P25 doesn't have an AA Filter and Phase One's noise removal doesn't impact the quality of the captured image that much.

The image above here of my friend Jay is straight from the P25 with no sharpening or post processing done. The P25 excels at image resolution and sharpness. When I looked at the first images I shot from the P25 I did indeed think "Wow, it's like looking through a window."

I knew from my first test shots with the P25 that it's color performance was amazing. Sunrises and sunsets usually produce a lot of contrast and color combinations. The dawn photo at the top of the page and this sunrise photo really show how well the P25 renders color. Dawn in particular is always difficult to correctly capture givin the subtle hues and atmospheric perspective. It's easy to crush the shadow details or over saturate the color palette. I invite you to download the wall papers of these images in particular because I feel they really show what the P25 can do. I was just really "wowed" and impressed the the P25's performance in the blue channel in particular. This is something I don't really see poping in a lot of todays popular Dslrs.

I really wanted to see if I was missing out on some these brilliant colors with my 1DsII, so I decided to do a direct comparison.

The time between these exposures is a matter of seconds. Around 3 to 5 seconds.

I had to process both images through Capture One and adjust the white balance. Although these are both manual exposures - the image processing, lens color cast, and sensor contributed to a noticable difference in color. I adjusted the 1DsII file to the P25 in this situation. Both cameras do an excellent job at capturing a nice color range. Canon's RAW file seemed to darken and saturate the blues more than the P25's. Both cameras also did a great job of handling the direct sunlight. The P25 renders that more as white and the Canon seems to produce a yellowish tint. Subtle, but diffent.

Also I'll note here that I was comparing the Hasselblad 80mm to Canon's 50mm. Why? Because in height they where very similar in captured area, however in width and Canon's wider aspect ratio you capture much more of the enviroment around you. You can see that in the twigs on the right of the below Canon frame.

The first comparison was nice for a predominately blue frame, but I waited around for the sun to set over this hill to get some warm color comparison. This is a longer exposure due to the lack of light, but both were taken seconds apart with mirror lock up and on the same tripod.

For whatever reason in the cosmos both the RAW files were fairly close when it came to color this time. I decided not to adjust the white balance at all. As you can see both camera did an excellent job again at capturing the natural palette as both frames are pretty true to my eye.

Enough landscapes though. Let's see how both cameras perform in the studio on some products.

I'll make a note of it here that I am purposely using a single strobe in this test situation because I wanted some nasty harsh shadows to test how well both cameras performed.

The test frames.

Each frame was shot on the same tripod and position. Both cameras experienced a smidge of light fall off in the corners, but that's not really a bad thing to me. Again you can see the difference in wider aspect ratio and focal length.

Take note of how well the cameras both did of capturing the dark in shadow background without crushing the blacks.

Let's get closer.

Both frames were just directly exported through Capture one. Now we can really see the differences between the two cameras. You'll first notice the sharpness of the P25 image. The lack of an AA Filter is clearly seen. The Canon image is softer, but not by too much.

You can see the difference in the way both cameras see color. By a hair, the P25 seems to have truer color. The yellows and blues are just a bit more saturated and you can see slightly smoother gradiants over well lit surfaces. Both cameras did a good job of capturing shadow detail. There is more visible noise in the shadows on the P25. However, the Canon goes to black faster than the P25. Not by much, but it's there.

Let's shoot some people.

In this frame you can see the P25 does a real nice job of not blowing out the highlights on Julian's right hand here while keeping very rich shadows as well.

On this shot I softened up the light source a bit so there wasn't as much contrast as the first shot. You can see the very subtle hues of red and green in Toby's skin tone.

After all this fun testing I wanted to see personally how both cameras changed the way I shot subjects on a real shoot. I went out and shot vocalist and muscician Sarah Ault.

Both photos were processed a bit. I found that there wasn't too much of a difference when shooting with both bodies. I am way more comfortable with the Canon 1 series body than the Hasselblad H1 body, but that's a preference. I was nervous about the composition with the P25 shots mostly because the lack of knowing what the actual frame will look like via the viewfinder.

The P25 is a favorite among fashion and commercial photographers. This P25 image of Sarah really shows why. The photo was a nice capture with a good amount of tonal detail in the highlights and shadows. The original image's white balance was set to "flash". I took a different route to process this one. I just exported it straight from Capture One and edited the colors in Adobe Photoshop CS2. I processed the 1DsII file in Adobe Camera Raw with a little tweak in Photoshop.

In general shooting I do like that I can set mirror lock up on the H1 to the user custom function button. Canon activates mirror lock up in a custom function within a menu and they need to update this for sure. I and many others have talked to Canon about adding this feature.

So what's my conclusion here? Who is the P25 for? What are the pros and cons? Are you going to buy one?

The P25 back itself is very simple to use. The menus are in a logical order. The buttons on the back are nice and big as well. I don't really know why the LCD preview of the image is so rough. I'll have to ask Phase One about that. The P25 uses Canon camcorder batteries. I was told they were good for around 400 shots. I'd say that's pretty accurate.

I have some issues with the H1 body (and other medium bodies for that matter). I already mentioned the lens issue which is huge for me. The mirror slap on the H1 jiggles the camera pretty badly. I can shoot hand held with my 1DsII at about 1/15th without the mirror moving the camera that much. I noticed blur on the P25 + H1 images at 1/90th. Having mirror lock up available at the touch of a button though is very nice. Also I'm very much used to and love my selectable AF points on the 1DsMKII. The H1 doesn't really have anything close to Canon's autofocus performance.

These are just my opinions. Anything without good light will be a challenge with the P25. It's a little large to really be used in some situations. And most medium backs really lack the focusing abilities that today's Dslrs provide. I noticed a good amount of hot pixels in my 1.3s and longer exporsure. My 1DsII doesn't have this problem at all.

Phase One's newer bodies all can be used tethered or hand held. That really sets them apart from their main competition. I didn't do any tethered shooting this time around because I really don't ever do that and it's not applicable to my needs.

Tough question really. The gain in resolution between 22 megapixels versus the 16.7 I get now isn't that big of a difference. My professional work spans many avenues. My initial reason for picking up the Canon 1DsMKII was because it did so many things so well.

We are also talking a large cash investment again. I have well over $30k in Canon gear and have a really complete system. I would need $25k just for the P25 back (probably going down to $18k or lower after the P45 comes out). That's a large amount of money for anybody really.

The P25, while wonderful isn't going to get my money. I really will need to see and use the 39 megapixel P45. If the P45 can perform as well as the P25 I may be picking one up in the future. Mostly because I personally enjoy producing work for large prints and that resolution bonus could improve the quality of the final image.

I do see why Michael Reichmann owns both systems. If I was primarily a landscape photographer I would definitely want a digital medium back solution. And without question I would currently choose Phase One over Leaf and other companies. It is a real pleasure to see the images come off of the P25.

For the time being I remain a Canon shooter and advocate. I am continually impressed what type of images and performance I'm getting out of my 1DsII. This is really an exciting time for Dslrs with Canon introducing the lower priced 5D and probably a sub $2k full frame Dslr in the near future.

If you have any questions or comments about this field report feel free to email me at phil@artbyphil.com.

I hope you enjoyed it.

Phil Holland
phfx.com