Hasselblad X1D 50C Review
The Hasselblad X1D 50c was announced in June 2016 and caused a lot of excitement as it was to be the world’s first mirrorless medium format camera. A couple of weeks ago Hasselblad loaned me the system with a couple of lenses to try out.
The digital camera system boasts a 50 million pixel 43.8 x 32.9 mm CMOS sensor in a sturdy camera body; so compact that you can chuck it in a shoulder bag with a 30mm and 45mm lens and head out for the day. Medium format photography, up untill now involved large bulky cameras and lenses and was usually consigned to the studio. But not anymore, now you can carry around a medium format camera for the day without breaking your back.
The team at Hasselblad UK vey generously landed me the X1D 50 c with 2 Hasselblad lenses the XCD30 and XCD45.
The camera itself despite being a medium format is considerably lighter than many professional 35mm (full frame) cameras. The Hasselblad X1D 50c is small, compact and slimline and great thought has gone into the ground-up design; it’s truly a new camera, not a rebranded or remodelled system. It has a superb touch menu interface and live view touch-to-focus which is very useful. Hasselblad has developed a new lens system for the camera with only a few lenses out at present but many more in the pipeline.
The start-up time is a little slow and takes approximately 7 seconds to come to life after you turn on, with an additional lag time of 2 seconds of processing time after each shutter click. But to be fair the file sizes are 115 MB each when you compare that to the 30mb of a DSLR’s RAW files you can see why there is some buffer time.
Elliott Matthews at York Hall Saturday 8th, April 2017
Shot on the Hasselblad X1D 50c
© Copyright Stewart Marsden
I spent the day in London enjoying shooting postcards and having fun wandering absently minded around the capital shooting what I saw. The Hasselblad X1D 50c is a refreshingly simple camera that produces amazing files, rich in colour and contrast. The images are crisp and sharp as you would expect from and Hasselblad system.
Coming from a Fujifilm X100 series camera for shooting street, I’m used to immediacy and a decent hit rate. The Hasselblad X1D being a slower camera took some time to adjust to. To begin with it felt a little impractical as an everyday camera until I shifted my mind set and slowed down toward a more deliberate approach to capturing images. Being less spontaneous I reverting back to collage mode when a roll of film held a limited 36 exposures. This allowed me to begin to really appreciate the camera’s details: the whisper-quiet shutter, a compact ergonomic body, simple design and an intuitive interface, including that beautiful touchscreen LCD display; and amazing viewfinder.
Normally, images posted in reviews are straight out of the box unedited conversions, but because that’s not how any photographer really works, the true test of raw images lies in post-production and how much you can extract from the RAW
This is where the X1D’s slower RAW processing time and battery drainage pay dividends. The camera’s giant 50 MP 44 x 33mm CMOS sensor, each of those 115MB RAW files has a substantial amount of information packed into 8272 x 6200 pixels, with stunning image quality.
While most other camera manufacturers favour certain colours, and skin tones and market their particular colour science: The Hasselblad X1D produces a more natural or even palette of colour with as much data as possible. This provides a photographer with as much RAW detail, and RAW colour information to interpret it in their own way giving a photographer much more creative freedom.
I took the Hasselblad X1D 50c to a night of professional boxing at London’s York Hall. I had my regular kit with me but still used the Hasselblad X1D from time to time. This is by no means a sports camera, but I was pleasantly surprised that the focus was able to keep up with the dynamic movement of the competitors. While the Camera didn’t suit my usual shooting style for such an event I did walk away with several images that I do like that I wouldn’t have otherwise caught.
With smartphone companies stepping up their camera game over the past few years, there are lots of selfies, perfect cups of coffee, and look what I had for lunch pictures being uploaded to the dopamine feedback loop exploiting Instagram algorithms designed to deliver consumers to advertising; the Hasselblad X1D is, in contrast, a gentle reminder that photography can be a methodical art form, rather than a spray and pray hobby of snapshots.
The Hasselblad X1DX1D II 50C continues to let creatives take medium format out into the world with its light build, upgraded electronics, and total connectivity featuring wi fi for tethered shooting
