Paul, the 60MP Dalsa sensor produces a stunning file and works amazingly well with tech wides and lots of shifting. Why did you want to change? Looking at your work you are getting good use of it. Very nice images.
I for one love working with my IQ160.
Regarding the crop I really like the angle of view with the 40mm HR and the IQ160 and with a smaller sensor I would loose quite a bit of it and with the 80mm on the Hasselblad I get also a nice angle of view for full length portraits and retain shallow dof at f2.8. With a smaller sensor I loose some of that since I would have to move further back to maintain equal composition.
Ken:
First and foremost, thanks for the compliments.
I wanted to give a good answer so I have added a series of images in an attempt to show the issue for me.
In my work I often find myself in mixed lighting, especially in the winter/fall time. In the first image, you can see the a shot I was working as a full 15mm L, C, and 15mm Right shift with the IQ260 and 40mm Rod. I know it's possible to just do the 15mm R and L, but many times I find I like to shoot the center as it's the best part of the lens and also has less color cast issue/LCC recovery issue.
In Image 1, you can see a classic shot, where 1/2 of the image is in bright light, with a pure blue sky, (which in this shot is polarized), and the right half of the shot is in total shade. This is problematic for any CCD back, albeit that the 160/260 can handle it a bit better since they have better highlight recovery IMO. Still I have to make a series of exposures, in this case I shot at 1/8th of a second and 1/2 of a second. I realize that these seem very close in speed, only 1 stop missing, but in reality it's huge. In the other images I have posted it's very clear that the difference just 2 stops the amount of light I was able to recover on the far right is significant. However the 1/2 speed shot did blow out the left side of the image so to get where I need to be, I will have to work up both and then blend. Looking closely on the files I attached you can see the increase in noise in the 1/8th of a second exposure. The color and saturation are close enough not to really matter, but the noise is considerable.
With modern Sony CMOS, I have shot this type of shot 1000's of times, and I know I could have easily pulled up the right side 2.75 stops and still had both great color and details. Just can't be done with CCD. CCD loves light, and on a bright day, it can't be beaten.
The other reason I invested in the 260, was I felt that the chip design was significantly different than the 160, (YES I DID DRINK THE KOOL AID ON ON THIS ONE), and that Phase One would continue to work on image quality, releasing firmware that would enable better results in situations like this one, but they haven't and are not going to. I also bet on the come (stupid) that the LE (Long exposure) mode would give me better recovery at the base setting of iso 140, and that is far from the truth, in fact most time it's much worse. On the first series of shots I took from this spot, I worked the images at iso 140 as there was a bit of a breeze and I wanted to get to 1/30 with the CL-PL on. The results were terrible, looking like iso 800, the worse quality I have gotten from the 260. It could have been a heat issue, but the day was cool and the back was not hot. I was shooting tethered, and had C1 setup to push the shadows on all images and I caught this noise and was able to drop back to iso 50 and came away with a series I could use. However if there had been significant wind that afternoon, I would have been done as I could not have gotten to a fast enough shutter speed unless I moved to sensor plus.
Seeing what I can get from the D800 and now D810 CMOS, I can only image what the 50Mp chip would do in a scene like this.
I hope the images are large enough to show the issues I am referring to.
Paul