The P45 back on my Hasselblad H1 continues to amaze me.  We recently held our companies annual national meeting at the Snowbird Resort just out of Salt Lake City.  Each year we do a group picture, and have been capturing this digitally since I purchased the original Kodak 16mp DCS back for a Mamiya 645 several years ago.  The size of the group has grown dramatically, and at this point includes over 200 people.  I’m not sure how many, but I’m guessing around 225.

Randy Collier and Dennis Cloutier take the picture (last year they “Photoshopped” themselves into it, forgot to this year) by hanging out a window a few floors up.  This is all natural light, so a little dodging and burning is done to even the light out.  The goal is a  fairly large print ... large enough that those that view it often walk up close to see how they looked in the picture.

I know it’s always said you don’t need any more resolution than a normal viewing distance.  I suppose most of the time that’s true, but that’s probably because looking at it close offers nothing.  If detail is there, I believe a big print invites the viewer to examine it, and enjoy small parts of the scene ... especially in an image like this.

So how good is it?  Here’s a small section at 1 to 1 pixel proportion.

Sure,it seems a little soft.  But notice how you can even make out the big question mark on the pin of the girl at the left.  Imagine how small this detail was in the original scene.  Printed, the detail is nice and clear.  What a great piece of equipment.

Dennis captured this same scene with his Nikon to use in the ending slide show.  I’m curious as to how much more detail the back captured.  I’ll post a follow up when I can get one of his files.

UPDATE:  So here is a couple of sections from Dennis’s Nikon D200.  This isn’t meant as a criticism to the Nikon, even a 1DsMark II wouldn’t have done much better.

Here’s the Nikon file enlarged to the same native file resolution

There’s a lot to be said for just having enough pixels to handle the small detail.  I know ... you don’t need it most of the time.  But it is sure nice to have when you do need, or just want it.