The Online Association of Photographers: The Hasselblad H6D-400C Multi Shot Captures Monster 400MP Photos

Tuesday, 16 January 2018

The Hasselblad H6D-400C Multi Shot Captures Monster 400MP Photos

Hasselblad just announced a camera capable of 400MP photos. The new H6D-400C MS is a “Multi Shot” camera that can capture 100MP photos with single exposures or gigantic 400MP ultra-resolution photos using its Multi-Shot capture feature.

Multi-Shot (or “pixel shift”) technology has been appearing in a number of digital cameras in recent years — examples include the Sony a7R III and the Olympus OM-D E-M5 II. It captures a series of nearly identical photos with the sensor shifted by exactly 1 pixel in each shot. The images are then combined to create a single ultra-resolution image with much greater detail than any of the individual shots.

The new H6D-400C MS is a successor to the H5D-200c of 2014, which could spit out massive 200MP images. The H6D-400C MS doubles that.

At the core of the H6D-400C MS is a 100MP CMOS sensor that measures 53.4×40.0mm. It has a 15-stop dynamic range and an ISO range of 64-12800.

Hasselblad’s Multi Shot feature can create a 400MP photo using 6 pixel-shifted exposures or a 100MP enhanced photo with 4 exposures (with a more accurate colors than the standard 100MP single exposure). The camera needs to be tethered to a computer during Multi-Shot shooting.

In creating 400MP photos, the first 4 exposures are shifted by 1 pixel to capture GRGB color data. 2 additional exposures are captured with ½-pixel shifts to increase the equivalent resolution from 100MP to 400MP. The resulting file is a 2.4GB 16-bit TIFF image with dimensions of 23200×17400 pixels.

The feature is “for those seeking the utmost in image quality and resolving power,” Hasselblad says. Here’s an example photo captured by photographer Göran Liljeberg (you can zoom into the ultra-resolution version here):

Here’s what a crop of the same photo looks like with an ordinary single exposure, a 4-shot multi-exposure, and a 6-shot multi-exposure:

Other specs and features of the Hasselblad H6D-400C MS include a USB 3.0 Type C connection, high-speed data transfers, 30FPS live view, dual memory card slots (CFast 2.0 and SD), a 3-inch display with 920K dots, a “smartphone style” user interface, HD and UHD video recording, a modular design, Wi-Fi, HDMI and audio I/O, and True Focus II.