17 July, 2005
Phase One’s Medium Format Digital Roadmap
The Luminous Landscape has a great article, Phase One Takes The High Ground, detailing that company’s product roadmap for the next 18 months or so.
The most amazing product on their roadmap has to be the Phase One P45, an almost-full-sensor medium format digital back with a 39 megapixel imaging chip. Wow. An uncompressed full-size 16-bit image from this camera weighs in at a whopping 224 megabytes! Fortunately the camera’s lossless image compression format brings that down to a 47 megabyte file. That’s still only 21 images on a 1 GB CF card, though!
Phase One is also introducing the new P30 and P21 digital backs, with 31 megapixels and 18 megapixels respectively.
Usually when a company announces new products this far out from delivery, it kills off demand for current products. Phase One has a very cool way to prevent this. You can buy any of these new backs today, and they’ll give you a P25 (if buying the P45) or a P20 (if buying the P30 or P21) right now. When the new backs are released, you simply swap it for the new one. They also have a great upgrade plan, whereby existing owners of P20 or P25 backs can upgrade to the new ones for a quite reasonable price.
The article also lists some recent Phase One announcements about wireless transfer for P backs, faster CF card performance, Capture One upgrades, and upcoming support for Adobe’s DNG RAW format.
Filed under: Phase One,RAW Files,Software
No Comments